IncTechnology.com > Doing Business Online

Track Comments about Your Business Online

Minda Zetlin — 2009-10-28T10:17:57-05:00

A few weeks ago, a Twitter user tweeted that she was planning to try Zitune, a restaurant in Los Altos, Calif. David Auerbach, the restaurant's co-owner got an e-mail alert from a Web-based service Trackle, calling his attention to the tweet. As he often does, he sent a response thanking her for visiting Zitune and asking how she'd liked it. Soon, they had a dialogue going. Then she asked if Zitune's chef (and Auerbach's brother-in-law) would like to be interviewed for her video blog.

"The restaurant business has been tough for the last year and a half," Auerbach says. "Having a blogger or video blogger write anything about us, any extra PR we can get is a huge plus. And Trackle found it."

Trackle is one of a new crop of online services that helps you "listen" for keyword mentions on social networks and around the Web, and will send an alert when someone mentions your business or product -- or your competitor. Services like Trackle go way beyond Google Alerts and other news alert services because they monitor microblogs such as Twitter, social networks such as Facebook, and the blogosphere, as well.

"Increasingly, it's consumers, not news outlets, that are putting out information other consumers use," says Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies, which both tracks keywords and interprets the resulting data. "Consumers have as much impact on your brand as you do." The majority of consumers check user reviews before making a major purchase, he notes.

But if knowing what customers and others are saying about you online is absolutely essential, it can also be very time-consuming. "You can spend a lot of time doing searches on Twitter and Facebook and Google and so on to find out who's talking about your restaurant," Auerbach says. "It's really helpful to get a daily update where everything is all in one place."

For Veronica Sopher, executive assistant at Ben Bridge Jeweler, looking after the company's social network presence is only one part of her job. She uses Social Mention among other services to follow Ben Bridge, but also flag mentions of "ring shopping," so as to find and start conversations with brides-to-be under her Twitter handle @BenBridgeGirl.

"I talk with them in a girly fashion and find out what wedding dress they're dreaming about or ask them to send me photos of the ring they're considering," she says. "My strategy is not to make sales with tweets, but to raise brand awareness and present a more personable side of what is often perceived as a cookie-cutter jewelry retailer." The advantage of a service like Social Mention, she adds, is that it also flags the company's name all over the Web, so if, for instance, a non-profit organization thanks Ben Bridge for a donation on its website, Sopher can follow up with a friendly e-mail.

Picking the right service

Most every small business can benefit from some online tracking of its name and product mentions around the Web and in social networks, but picking the right service can be tricky. Services range from completely free to a minimum charge of $500 a month -- and most seem to fall at one extreme or the other. The pay services will aggregate thousands of mentions according to metrics like "sentiment" (whether people are mentioning you in a negative or positive light).

Here are some popular choices:

Social Mention, a free service, allows you to search the Web, as well as Twitter and Facebook for keywords, and can list them in a once-a-day e-mail alert as well or get a "Realtime buzz" widget for your website.
Trackle tracks keywords across the Internet and social media, but also tracks many other items, such as weather in your location, local news, real estate values, and even crime in your neighborhood. You can get email alerts, or any of the company's "tracklets" can also be used as widgets.
Viralheat alerts you to mentions with some analytics and a new option to filter results by location. It's a rare moderately priced pay option, with plans starting at $9.99 a month a month to track up to 10 keywords or phrases.
Visible Technologies has plans starting at $500 per month for up to 20,000 results and offers analysis to help you get the sense of what people are saying. "Small businesses can do a lot of tracking with free tools," Cahill notes. "But as brands get popular and the volume gets big, it becomes difficult to follow all those mentions."

Whichever service you use, experts agree, it's important to not only listen to what people are saying, but respond promptly. "Social networks can help bring a problem to the surface faster than it would otherwise," Cahill says. By letting users know you're working to solve the problem you may find some of your critics turn into defenders, he says. But, he adds, "Once you start engaging in a dialogue with customers on a social network, you have to be genuine, you have to be transparent, and you have to keep at it."

"I try never to go 24 hours without checking what people are saying about us and posting," Sopher adds. "Once you have a presence in social media, it's like adopting a puppy. You can't ignore it."

Tech Talk: Vehicle ID Firm Upgrades Internet

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-10-21T16:46:17-05:00

DLG Group, headquartered in Bedminster, N.J., started out in the 1960s inspecting vehicle and cargo at sea ports and handwriting reports for manufacturers and insurance companies. The Internet era allowed the company to issue those inspection reports on the same day from the field and use the data to help customers improve quality control. Upgrading to fiber-optic based Internet service today has let the business expand and offer online services for customers, CEO and President Andrew Vazquez Jr. tells IncTechnology.com.

Elizabeth Wasserman: What's your company's story?

Andrew Vazquez: The DLG Group started out as Automotive Visual Inspections (AVI) as a family business that began in the mid-1960s. My father started the business and I started working for it full time in 1980. It's an automotive inspection business that verifies vehicles for damage for insurance purposes for imported and exported vehicles shipped overseas.

Wasserman: How has your business evolved?

Vazquez: One of the shipping lines came to me in the early 1980s and wanted to automate statistical information on damage for claims settlement and to improve quality control. They came to me and asked if I would assist them in developing an electronic system to do that. They would give me the programmers and I would help them design a system. Later we needed our own electronic systems and started developing our own proprietary electronic system tracking inspections, warehouse management and vehicle tracking. Taking that technology around 2004 we branched out into the vehicle logistics side of the business and launched Vehicle Logistics Solutions, which is a logistics company that works with various vehicle manufacturers in the Midwest, starting in Michigan and Ohio. But we positioned ourselves to be flexible if a customer needed a facility for short-term or long-term use to keep vehicles until they were sold.

Wasserman: How did the Internet change your business?

Vazquez: We started inspecting in the 1960s and 70s with a typewriter and carbon paper. If our customers in Europe received a report to settle a marine claim two months later, they were happy. In the 1980s, we were one of the first companies to use hand-held computers in the field. It helped us basically save a lot of steps. It used to be our inspectors would go out in the field and record information on paper, transpose to type back in the office, and then the report would hit the mail. Now we are able to take that electronic data and upload it immediately to our databases and send our files electronically. It saved us a lot of time and gave our customers a lot of power. The customer did not just receive data to settle claims but could actually use data for quality control of service. The quicker they could act on either a problem on their hands or the factory where the vehicle was manufactured the better.

Wasserman: How did that impact your needs for Internet service?

Vazquez: Back then the files weren't as large and the bandwidth wasn't as big. Most of the handhelds we used were more like electronic notepads. Now that the bandwidth is here and the technology is state of the art and has much better coverage, we've upgraded our systems and now data with photos can be transmitted in real time. Our workers can upload data and photos out in the field which means they don't have to return to the office to file their report. Now our customers can have their report immediately. We can communicate with any employee by putting a cell phone in their hand computer equipped with a wireless card. You probably would have needed two or three times more people to do the same job we're doing today.

Right now, I have offices in seven different states and also do other projects that have to be in various states across the country. We've had projects in the past where we've had to be in 32 cities around the country each quarter. Having Verizon as our communications provider really helped. We've upgraded to Verizon FIOS Internet for Business, which enabled us to become an application service provider for our customers, as well. We started another business called Vehicle Inspection Network which allows our customers to use our electronic inspection and reporting systems. We give them a log on and password. We have a lot of traffic now in and out of our central office here so it's very important that we have very good, reliable service. You can't sell a service if your Internet is slow or weak.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Vazquez: It gave me the confidence to launch the application service provider portion of the business. If I was having a problem with companies accessing our system, I wouldn't have been able to do it. We've also started another new company called Hybrid Intermodal Transportation. This business is a freight distribution company. What makes it unique is that we've developed these specialized containers that can be loaded with freight. Today, in the automotive industry, whether they are transported by truck, rail, or vessel, vehicles are being carried in one direction and being dropped off. Many vehicle carriers or assets go back empty. It's a waste of fuel. We've developed containers that we can load with freight onto these car carrier assets, creating the opportunity to fill the empty miles of the industry. We track these containers electronically with our systems.

The Real-Time Web and You

Vijay Chittoor — 2009-10-21T16:39:39-05:00

One of the biggest technology trends in 2009 has been the emergence of the "Real-Time Web." The real-time Web is a made up of technologies and practices that can inform users as soon as information is published, instead of requiring users to check for updates. The real-time Web discards the traditional notion of the more static “webpages,” and instead adopts the notion of dynamic “streams” of information. The real-time Web is also very conversational because it makes it possible to get instant responses across very large networks of people.

Action in the real-time Web started with companies like Twitter and Friendfeed, which built their own infrastructure for large scale delivery of real-time messages. By providing Web service application programming interfaces (APIs), these companies enabled many other developers to create applications based on the real-time Web. However, Anil Dash, a prominent blogger, points out that real time services need not be built on the back of Twitter and Facebook anymore. Due to emerging technologies, the pieces are falling together for creating a free, open and decentralized “pushbutton platform,” which makes it easy for websites to add real-time messaging services. With these developments, we can expect many more websites to jump onto the real-time bandwagon.

Growing importance to business

The real-time Web is becoming increasingly important to businesses in multiple ways. Firstly, as many webmasters and Web analytics companies have pointed out, the real-time Web is starting to rival search engines like Google as a source of website traffic. For example, Mark Cuban talked a few months ago about how his blog receives more visits from Twitter and Facebook than from Google. Secondly, the real-time Web opens up communication opportunities that the traditional Web could not have provided. For instance, if an airline wants to sell off its last minute tickets, the real-time Web provides a great outlet for advertising this very time-sensitive deal. Thirdly, by making information instantaneously accessible, the real-time Web can create, or erase, instances of information arbitrage. As an example, take a look at Skygrid, a service that provides high quality financial news in real time, giving its users an edge, but at the same time leveling the playing field between professional investors and amateurs in terms of the speed of access to reliable information. Finally, because the real-time Web is very conversational, it becomes a repository of people’s sentiment, and mining this sentiment can be very useful to marketers and others.

Taking advantage of real-time Web

Beyond creating an account on Twitter, how can you take advantage of the real-time Web? Here are some thoughts to get you started:

Engage with the real-time Web with tailored offers and content. Several companies are seeing success with time-sensitive programs that could not have been conceived without the real-time Web. Jet Blue’s “cheeps” and United Airlines’ twares are exclusive Twitter promotions for last minute fare deals. Another company that has encountered great success with offering exclusive deals on Twitter is Dell. A Dell blog post from June mentioned that Dell had surpassed $2 million in Twitter sales fro Dell Outlet, which sells refurbished items, scratch and dent items, and previously ordered new laptops. The real-time Web also acts as a place where people express their intent to shop (e.g. someone may tweet “thinking of buying an ipod touch.”) Selectively targeting such users, without spamming them, might also be a great way to help your customers make real time buying decisions. A service like Twitterhawk can be used to automate this kind of marketing.
Make use of real-time Web tools for business intelligence. The real-time Web is a great source of knowledge and sentiment about your customers, your competitors and your industry. You can use services like Firstrain to research the real Web for the news that matters to you. You could also use Twitter’s search functionality in simple ways to keep track of some of this information, or go to one of the many real time search engines. A recent article in mashable talks about the many tools that help analyze Twitter content.
Join in the conversation about your company. In one of my previous articles, I had talked about how companies like Comcast are using Twitter to understand their customers’ concerns and address them. The conversational nature of real time web can be very powerful in building relationships with your customers.
Create the infrastructure that allows your company to respond in real time. Real-time enterprise data integration has been around for a long time. However, with the emergence of the real-time Web and the opportunities it creates, it is becoming increasingly critical for companies to be able to access all their internal data in real time. In other words, “real-time data integration is no longer a luxury.”

Vijay Chittoor is the director of product management at Kosmix, an exploration engine that offers a 360 degree view of any topic on the Web. A former McKinsey consultant, Chittoor is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He shares his thoughts on technology at his blog.

Twitter's New Tweets for Small Business

Michelle V. Rafter — 2009-09-28T13:56:26-05:00

Twitter is open for business.

The social network isn’t charging anybody for anything yet, and isn’t making any money -- apart from the $100 million in venture financing it recently raised. But the San Francisco, Calif., start up is headed in that direction, with plans to offer paid commercial accounts later this year.

Skeptics question whether paid accounts will catch on, or simply damage Twitter’s reputation and momentum, which has seen the company’s traffic jump to 23.5 million monthly visitors in August from 2.6 million in August 2008, according to Compete.com, the Web analytics firm.

Regardless of how things shakes out, over the past few months the little company with the big social network has been making itself over to be more business friendly.

The changes come at a time when many small businesses are figuring out what Twitter can do for them. One example is iContact, a Durham, N.C., e-mail marketing software maker with 180 employees and 50,000 customers that started using Twitter for customer service about a year ago. “When our site is down, we tweet out updates every 20 minutes to keep the community informed,” says Chuck Hester, iContact’s communications director. “We answer questions for customers, and then take them off line to complete the customer-service process.” Currently five iContact marketing and communications department staff members and the company’s CEO have Twitter accounts, “to help with consistency of our message,” Hester says.

Twitter’s business initiatives

To reach more businesses such as iContact, Twitter’s unveiled a formal outreach program that starts at the company’s virtual front door. The site’s home page has been redesigned to display a search window and a list of trending topics -- all the better to show potential users how the network can be used to do real-time searches on what people are talking about.

Other business-friendly additions:

The business channel -- Look at any Twitter page and you’ll see a set of links across the bottom -- including one marked “Business.” Clicking on it brings up a special section called Twitter 101 created to explain the network’s business benefits. The section includes a how-to guide co-written by Sarah Milstein, a consultant, speaker and co-author of The Twitter Book. It also includes case studies, tips on etiquette and other best practices, and links to additional resources.

Verified accounts -- After impersonators set up fake accounts for everyone from Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld to the Dalai Lama, Twitter in June began offering verified accounts so fellow networkers can be assured tweets from celebrities, politicians, or other public figures are the real deal. Authenticated accounts sport a small blue badge with a white check mark and the words “Verified Account” on the top right portion of the user’s profile page. Though they’re most popular with TV and movie stars, business, and social media heavy hitters such as former GE Chairman Jack Welch and tech blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble have verified accounts. Verified business accounts aren’t widely available yet, but the company is beta testing the service and asking interested companies to fill out a verified business account form if they want to be considered in the future.

Modified terms of service -- In early September, Twitter strengthened the terms of service (TOS) governing what people can and can’t do when they’re logged on, in part to clean up spammers, pornography, and other Wild West elements that were making the service not ready for business prime time. At the time the new TOS were announced, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said they “more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues.” In addition to barring spam and porn, the new TOS reaffirms that users own their tweets and that Twitter has the right to share content with developers of add-on programs. They also keep the door open for advertising at some point in the future. While Twitter officials haven’t publicly discussed where or when advertising might appear, a new study by Los Angeles Internet researcher Interpret LLC found that Twitter users are twice as likely to click on ads or sponsors as users of Facebook or MySpace.

Twitter’s business-focused upgrades can’t come soon enough for Joel Don, owner of Comm Strategies, a boutique technology public relations and marketing agency in Irvine, Calif. Don has been gradually nudging clients onto Twitter, in one case opening an account for a computer manufacturer before he even told them. “That was about two weeks ago,” says Don, who’s since received his client’s blessing. “It's still way too early to demonstrate ROI. But I really want to see how such an account can evolve or be evolved by a company into an alternative means of doing business. Not the only way, but an alternative.”

Avoid Social Media Faux Pas

Michelle V. Rafter — 2009-09-28T13:49:00-05:00

Last year when Joe Pulizzi got serious about using Twitter to promote his business, he downloaded an add-on application for the social network called TweetDeck and configured it to send an automated greeting every time someone new started following his tweets.

Almost instantly, the Cleveland, Ohio, marketing consultant’s connections let him know on Twitter any kind of automatic message is a big no-no, whether it’s an innocuous “Hi, thanks for following, how’re you doing?” or the most blatant self-promotion. “A couple people replied right away to say, Joe, this is lame, it’s basically spam,” says Pulizzi, owner of Junta42. After two weeks he shut the auto-replies off and hasn’t been tempted to use them since.

If you're using Twitter, Facebook,

or LinkedIn in your small business, the last thing you want is to alienate potential customers before they've even gotten to know you. So along with avoiding automated replies, industry experts and companies that have successfully navigated potential social media faux pas say it’s best to have a strategy and share it with employees who’ll be representing the business online. Though it’s a new medium, the rules of old-fashioned etiquette and common sense apply.

Here are other common social media mistakes small businesses make, and what they can do instead:

Posting without a plan -- Going on Twitter or Facebook just because it’s there isn’t a good enough reason and could lead to sticky situations if employees post something inappropriate or inadvertently disclose confidential company information. Kent Lewis, a social media marketer and head of Anvil Media, in Portland, Ore., recalls the time an intern at a local hotel he works with was given statistics about the property’s competitors -- and immediately shared the info on Twitter. “It made her look stupid,” Lewis says. “We didn’t realize we had to coach her on life, not just social media.” Before you do anything, figure out how Twitter et al fit into your company’s marketing or customer service strategy, then decide how to use social networks to get that message across and make sure employees are on board, he says.
Repeating yourself -- A tweet or status update to announce the latest post on the company blog, a new customer win or some other good news is okay. But broadcasting the same message over and over is not. Unfortunately some newcomers don’t figure that out and post the same tweet or status update over and over, making them look like the newbies they are, according to Lewis.
Selling 24/7 -- It’s okay to use social networks to plug whatever your company sells or does. It’s not okay to do it in 100 percent of the time. A one-trick pony is a major turn off. Instead, mix promotional tweets with links to industry news, and retweet interesting things people in your network are saying. Do it long enough and your connections will come to know and trust you as a voice of authority in your industry, and will be more accepting of your promotional tweets, Lewis says.
Faking it – Some companies mistakenly think that no matter how many people represent their business online -- whether it’s one or 20 -- everyone has to tweet or post in a single voice, either through a made-up mascot or persona, or by using a certain tone or language that tows the company’s party line. That works in some cases, but it’s hard to pull off, Lewis says. The better solution is to coach employees on what is and isn’t acceptable, then let them be themselves.
Farming it out -- Some companies pay “ghost tweeters” or outside experts to run their social media strategy. Wrong, Lewis says. Comcast developed a huge Twitter presence by putting their best people on it for tech support, and making sure they responded quickly to customers’ problems, he says. “It was minimal cost for maximum return,” he says. Of course Lewis believes companies should hire social media consultants -- he would or he wouldn’t be in business. But if you do, use them to craft a plan and train your employees, not speak for them, he says.

Today all that advice makes sense to Pulizzi, the marketing strategist, who now spends a good chunk of time traveling through the United States and Europe preaching the gospel of social media. Pulizzi also recommends against solely using Twitter or Facebook to re-tweet or repeat what other people say. “To be regarded as a thought leader or solution provider, you need to have your own content,” Pulizzi says.

The worst thing small businesses can do is look at Twitter and other social networks as just another sales channel. “Marketers are horrible publishers,” Pulizzi says. “They want to create content about their products and services. There’s a time and place for that, but it’s not social media. You create relationships with social media, so when people are ready to buy they look at you as a trusted resource.”

Lessons from the Most Successful Internet Marketing Campaign Ever

Brent Leary — 2009-09-10T12:12:41-05:00

It's been almost a year ago since the Los Angeles Times included a quote from my Barack 2.0 blog post after the presidential election. I stated how I thought Obama and his social media team had just pulled out the most successful Internet marketing campaign ever. Hyperbole aside, I still believe this to be true. And while the Times article talked about the social networking success of the campaign, the subject of the article was more on how Obama’s social network operation had “vanished,” because there had been no tweets, no blogs, and no diggs since election night.

The theme of the story was that some people who were used to engaging with Obama via social networks felt like they had been cut off to a certain extent. I thought about this because recently I’ve been asked quite a few times if I thought President Obama’s continued frequent use of social media had actually drowned out the importance of his message. Interesting thoughts and perspectives on both ends, which I think provides some new lessons about social media that are every bit as important as the ones we analyzed over at the Barack 2.0 site.

This is a great business lesson for us all -- the more we establish ourselves online we have to be ready for all kinds of reactions to what we do. We’ll have to fight to get our message across, and also be prepared to address competition that is looking to build relationships with those we’d like to keep doing business with.

Social media success breads competition

One thing that’s hard to dispute is that Obama’s victory last November set off a tidal wave of interest in how he used social media. All you have to do is look at Twitter to understand this. When we started the Barack 2.0 weekly updates last summer, Obama was the third most-followed person with about 35,000 followers. By August, he had taken over the top spot with about 59,000. By election night, he was up to about 150,000 followers, and by Inauguration Day, his follower count was around 300,000 -- and way ahead of everybody else. But these numbers are dwarfed by the 3.4 million followers that actor Ashton Kutcher -- the Twitterer with the most followers -- now has.

So more people are on social networks because of his success. More people have also studied the campaign’s use of social media not just to try to replicate its success, but also to compete with it. This should come as no surprise, because this happens in the real world every day. When you reach the top -- a place many of us want to go -- you might as well put on the old target right on your back. And because anybody can tweet, put up Facebook pages, and shoot YouTube videos, people have learned that success comes from using an organized, strategic approach to using these tools. So instead of having limited social media competition to get messaging across, now other political groups are much more effective in asserting their competing positions. The parallels are all around you in the business world. Once you start a blog, your competitors will start a blog. Once you start using viral video, so will competitors. And so on.

Different situations call for different tactics

Thinking back to the Times article, one thing I keep going back to are the words of those feeling “left behind” and disconnected after the election. The Obama campaign had just pulled off something historic, and now had to switch gears and concentrate more on transition than on Twitter. And while a majority of his followers probably understood the new focus and direction, there were those who expected the same level of social media engagement, or close to it.

During the campaign there was a call to action that many people heeded. A myriad of social tools were used to organize people and activities, which created a certain rhythm and style that people became comfortable with on the way to Nov. 5. And even though the President and his administration still utilize social media in a number of ways, there may have been a disruption in the rhythm they initially created during the campaign that started the day after the election. That was when the competitors took the first steps in finding their social media rhythm to engage people to organize and take action.

Recently it appears that the administration is trying to find their social media rhythm to re-connect and engage with the folks that felt “left behind.” But for us in the business world, the lesson here is once you’ve made that connection using social media, it’s important to try and stay connected -- even when our circumstances change. And more critically, it’s important to keep a rhythm that is comfortable for all involved. Situations may be altered on either side, and the tempo may change, but it’s the comfort level created by that rhythm which gives us a chance to work through these changes.

While there were many social media lessons to take away from the “most successful internet marketing campaign ever,” sometimes it’s the tough lessons that give us our best opportunities to learn. We can’t afford to let a more competitive environment, or possibly our own missteps, permanently disrupt a good communication flow. Success, even in the realm of social media, comes with bumps and bruises. And these bumps can come quickly, spread further and last longer if we lose the rhythm of engagement that helped us successfully meaningfully connect with people -- be it politically, personally or professionally. Another great business lesson in the age of social media.

Brent Leary is a small-business technology analyst, adviser, and award-winning blogger. He is the co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business. His blog can be found at http://brentleary.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/brentleary.

Social Media: More than Creating Connections

Vijay Chitoor — 2009-08-24T17:09:34-05:00

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs is to scale up their business, and to manage the growth by hiring more people in every function. But what if you could achieve growth by just letting your community of users do most of the work?

Several creative companies have used social media tools to get their customers involved in core aspects of their business, all the way from marketing to product design, product testing, and customer service. Here are some great examples of organizations that are using social media to drive sales and efficiencies, while still connecting with customers:

Effective marketing using social media

By now, most people know that social media provides many tools for creating brand awareness, as well as for generating sales leads. Fiskars, a Finland-based manufacturer of scissors realized that scissors are very popular among scrapbookers, and set out to reach this community. After identifying four Fiskars users who were extremely passionate about the brand, the company set them up with a website and a blog, and made them consumer evangelists. The “Fiskateers” program has since then grown to more than 5,000 Fiskateers across 70 countries, each actively blogging and evangelizing the brand. Having so many “marketers” on its payroll would certainly have been unsustainable for the company, but by leveraging the power of its community, and using online tools like blogging, Fiskars has created a strong brand identity among its target audience.

Blogging isn’t for you? Try Twitter to connect with your audience. Naked Pizza of New Orleans, which prides itself on making the “world’s healthiest pizza,” has latched onto Twitter as a means of promoting its fresh ingredients and offering promotional deals. Twitter has been so effective that they’re now using billboards to drive more people to the Twitter account. More and more restaurants are finding Twitter to be an effective way to boost their sales.

Finally, no discussion of social media marketing is complete without talking about viral videos. Blendtec, a division of the Utah-based K-TEC, manufactures high powered, durable, commercial blenders. In 2006, Marketing Director George Wright had the unenviable task of creating a brand campaign with a budget of $50. When Wright saw CEO Tom Dickson and some engineers testing the blenders with heavy duty chunks of wood, he hit upon an idea and used the $50 to buy the domain http://www.willitblend.com. Since then, the “Will it Blend” series of videos has seen more than 80 million views on YouTube and increased Blendtec’s sales by more than 700 percent.

Involve customers in product design

How can you add value and create customer loyalty if you don’t even control your product design process? Threadless, an online T-shirt store operated by the Chicago-based skinnyCorp, has found the secret to that, selling more than a million T-shirts a year, none of which were designed by the staff. All the designs are submitted and evaluated by the community of users on its website. Hundreds of artists submit their designs, and users vote on them. Every week, the best designs are selected for printing, and the winning designers get $2,000 in cash, $500 in gift certificates, and another $500 for every reprint. According to some reports, the company generates more than $30 million in revenue and $10 million in profits.

Muji, a Japanese retailer, has latched onto a similar concept through its website muji.net, where it invites submissions for innovative furniture designs. Muji, which means “without brand,” has a community of half a million people who submit and evaluate designs. Shortlisted designs are then sent to professional designers, who polish them before sending them off for production.

Web companies often launch products in a “beta” state and invite selected users to test the product. Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company took this idea and applied it to coffee. It invited bloggers to beta-test its coffee by sending them free samples. More than 1,500 bloggers participated, and generated enormous buzz for Joffrey’s on the Web. Based on feedback from these bloggers, Joffrey’s launched Coffee 2.0 with many “bug fixes and improvements.” Even the name Coffee 2.0 came from one of the beta testing bloggers. Not only did Joffrey’s use social media effectively to do product testing and improvements, but it also created enormous buzz around the product.

Get customers to help with customer support

Customer support is one of the most difficult things to scale as the business grows. Consumers are increasingly logging on to social media sites to express their frustration with poor service. For example, the consumer complaint video “United Breaks Guitars ” has had close to 5 million views on YouTube.

Innovative companies are using social media in a couple of different ways to provide customer support. eBay has outsourced almost its entire customer support function to its users from its very beginnings. In his book The Perfect Store, Adam Cohen writes about eBay in 1996: “Omidyar did not have time to explain to each individual user how to write a listing in HTML, or to give advice on bidding strategy.” The solution was to launch a Bulletin Board where users could “gather, share information and ask for help.” Later, eBay ended up hiring some of the people who were the most active and helpful on the forums to work for it, answering customer emails and providing additional support.

A different model of support treats social media as another channel for the in-house customer support team. Frank Eliason, Comcast director of digital care, has a following of more than 25,000 people on his “Comcast Cares” Twitter account, where he answers user questions. The real-time nature of Twitter and its search functionality allow Eliason to even reach out to Comcast users who haven’t actively sought help.

By applying a bit of imagination to social media tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, these forward-thinking companies have grown their businesses by leaps and bounds. Take cues from these examples of the power of community, and you’ll avoid some of the growth pains that arise from controlling and managing all of your business functions in-house.

Vijay Chittoor is the director of product management at Kosmix, an exploration engine that offers a 360 degree view of any topic on the Web. A former McKinsey consultant, Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He shares his thoughts on technology at his blog.

Tech Talk: Online Meetings Serve Clients

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-07-16T14:24:04-05:00

COCC, of Avon, Conn., provides information technology services to community banks and credit unions to help process checking accounts, debit card transactions, loan accounts, ATM transactions and more. The company's use of online meetings, says vice president Brent Biernat, has allowed COCC to better service customers, avoid travel costs, and expand its offerings to existing customers.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell me about COCC and how you use technology.

Brent Biernat: COCC is a cooperative data center for financial institutions, banks, and credit unions. We provide their transaction processing for them. If you go to a community bank in Connecticut, New England, Ohio, New York, or the Northeast, there is a good chance that your transaction is being processed by COCC. We've been around for 40 years and have about 350 employees.

Wasserman: Why did you invest in a virtual meeting service?

Biernat: Every company in the world says they are very concerned about customer service, and as a cooperative we live and breathe customer service. The presidents of all these financial institutions sit on our board of directors. They fill out report cards about our service. We want to be able to stay high touch as we continue to add more credit unions. We want to be able to communicate with them more readily. And there was a great technology to enable us to do it from GoToMeeting. If you try to do this on a regular phone and conference call, you lose something. You don't have that collaboration.

Wasserman: How do you use it?

Biernat: We do a lot of it with our customers. There are various reasons. We do a lot of online training with them to show them a new feature in or product or to give them an update. We use it to introduce them to a new product or show them an entire demonstration. And we also use it to do regular collaboration if we have a project going on with them. We set it up and all join together and we can have some webpages or material in front of us that everyone can see. We also use it internally if we have a lot of production items we want to review and make changes to. In the past, what we'd have to do is gather in a conference room and huddle around for a discussion with a few callers on speaker phones. We have several buildings on our campus. It wastes productivity if you're trying to have a meeting and gather everyone in a room and you don't realize how much time that costs when you can have an online meeting with these same folks and they can join in right from their desks. They don't have to spend that time walking and socializing. It's much more efficient.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Biernat: Essentially, it's saved us a significant amount of money and still helped us to maintain a very high touch with our customers. In the past, we used a rival technology and an average meeting cost us $250. We found this easier for our customers to use. We've saved lots in terms of travel costs alone. Every time we get in a car or on a plane it ends up costing a lot. We figure we've saved about $3,000 a month in travel costs. The flip side of that is that we still want to get our executives out in front of our customers so they still have meetings where they have face-to-face time but during the travel time back, they can call in and be part of the regular internal meetings or join another customer call.

Wasserman: How long have you been using virtual meetings?

Biernat: We've been using this technology for four years now. We pay a flat monthly fee per host for the service and can host unlimited meetings. We've really incorporated it into our overall strategy. As a financial services company, we're always concerned about pandemic planning and we've made sure we're set up for it. The virtual meetings are a piece of that. If swine flu seriously increased, it would allow us to have meetings without being face to face in a closed room.

The Character of Your Web Content

Brent Leary — 2009-07-14T16:23:58-05:00

In his immortal speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream for this country. In one of the most quoted parts of the speech, he spoke of his wish to see his children judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Those words will live on forever to inspire generations of people to come. Because the content of our character is what tells people who we are, what we believe in and what we stand for. And through this speech we understood the content of this remarkable man’s character.

So if we’re to be judged, we’d like to be judged by our accomplishments, capabilities, and by what we’re made of. And from a business perspective, we not only should want to be judged in this manner, we need to be judged as so. However, the people we seek judgment from do not preside over courtrooms and pound gavels, but rule over social networks and comment on blogs. But shrinking attention spans coupled with an exponentially-increasing supply of online information is making it harder for us to plead our case to the judge. One thing we do know -- the only way we stand a chance of having the content of our character judged in the age of social media is by creating content that is full of character.

Some may confuse character-filled content with colorful content. Others may feel images, pictures, and videos will turn heads and focus eyeballs. And they absolutely can, but only for a minute if there’s no real substance accompanying the color. Because substance is what our online judges are looking for to allow them to make important decisions. And while it is important to offer up content on a regular basis, the quality of it is the most important factor.

Quality of content not quantity

Many feel it’s too time consuming to create good content, or that it’s too daunting a task. But you don’t have to write volumes to share the content of your character. Abraham Lincoln needed less than three hundred words to express his feelings for what took place on a battlefield in Maryland during his Gettysburg Address. What many feel was the most important speech in our country’s history is shorter than the average blog post. No Flickr picture or YouTube video necessary. But even today those words move people to tears. Just as Martin Luther’s words, nailed to the door of a church in Germany, started a religious revolution that’s still being felt almost 500 years later.

Using content to display our true character, as individuals as well as business entities, is not a new thing. But we have to be ready and willing to make sure the content we produce represents us in a truly meaningful way. Meaningful to us -- as we need to represent ourselves and our businesses properly. More importantly, we need to make it meaningful to the judges out there who have to make the important decision on whether or not we have the expertise, experience, and character to help them answer the challenges they face.

Despite the obstacles we are faced with, in terms of creating content that captures the attention of our online judges, it’s time to get over it. Don’t tell it to the judge, because they have their own issues and concerns to deal with. They are looking for help -- good help. They’re willing to search for it, discuss it, and share their story in order to find it. So use pictures, videos, blogs, and whatever you need to share your story. Post once a day, once a week, or once a month. Automate, co-create, and user generate it if it can help streamline the generation process. But remember one thing: All the judges ask is that you make it as easy as possible on them to find the real you, by creating content that allows them to understand your business’ character. Now go out there and throw yourselves on the mercy of the court.

Brent Leary is a small-business technology analyst, adviser, and award-winning blogger. He is the co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business (http://barack20.com). His blog can be found at http://brentleary.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/brentleary.

Using Twitter to Find Customers

Minda Zetlin — 2009-06-25T16:19:20-05:00

Boloco, a burrito restaurant chain with 16 locations often runs ads in a Boston newspaper. The ads contain coupons for the chain’s popular burritos for a special price of $3. It makes sense to advertise in Boston, since 13 of the chain’s 16 restaurants are there, but CEO and co-founder John Pepper wished the ads could also bring customers to Boloco restaurants in New Hampshire and Vermont. So, when he ran one recent ad, Pepper also posted a photo of the coupon on Twitter, inviting diners to bring in any image of the coupon -- a photocopy, printout, or even an image on a mobile phone -- to get the discount.

“It was a way to bring people outside Boston in the print advertising, and a way to increase our visibility,” says Pepper, whose Twitter ID is @boloco. The tactic proved wildly successful, he says. “Usually we get about 350 coupons on that kind of promotion. This time we got 900, including the mobile phones. About 25 percent of our transactions that day came from the coupon, which never happens.” In effect, he says, posting the ad on Twitter decreased cost per reader by increasing circulation.

Connecting with customers

Most business that use Twitter think of it mostly as a promotional tool, a way to announce new products, perhaps gain readers for a blog. But some smarter companies are actually using Twitter to sell products, such as Dell Corp., which recently acknowledged that it had made $3 million in sales in two years over Twitter, primarily by posting coupon numbers for discounts of 10 percent or more on Dell Outlet items.

“There’s no reason not to try Twitter,” notes Stefanie Nelson, marketing manager for Dell, who created Dell Outlet’s Twitter campaign. “There’s no cost, and it’s a limited time commitment, at least it was for me at the beginning. Before we built up the following and reach that we have now, it took me literally minutes a week.” (Things have gotten a bit busier now that @DellOutlet has over 700,000 followers.)

According to Nelson, the most important first step is to know exactly what you want your tweets to accomplish. “Understand why you’re on Twitter,” she says. In her case, she adds, the objective was to quickly sell Dell Outlet items, which are usually excess inventory. And, she says, “If you know your objective, and who your target audience is, Twitter can be just as effective for a small company as a large one.”

Boost sales with Tweets

Using coupons to create boost sales is only one way to reach customers with tweets. Here are a few others:

Give your company a human face. Pepper uses TweetDeck to track mentions of “Boloco” on Twitter, and one day it flagged a tweet in which a woman bemoaned the cool, rainy weather this summer and pondered whether to spend the afternoon at Boloco or a different restaurant. “I’ll respond to that one, with something like, ‘I vote for Boloco!’” he says. Twitter users are usually pleasantly surprised, he adds. “They expect @Boloco to be like @DunkinDonuts. They don’t expect to hear from the head of the company.” There’s a delicate balance between making human contact, and sharing too many everyday details that may not interest your customers, Nelson says, a dilemma she partly addresses by using @StefanieatDell for more personal tweets. Whatever you do, she advises, avoid spamming followers with promotional direct messages not specifically written for them.
Find customers when they’re looking for your product or service. Searching Twitter can be a very effective way to find new customers. For instance, Rocky Mountain Ace Stores, an affiliation of Denver area Ace store owners, uses monitter to search Twitter for both keywords and locations of tweeters. One day, the group flagged a Denver man worrying about insects in his lawn. “So we tweeted to him about beneficial insects, such as ladybugs, which will eat bugs all summer, and which we sell,” says Andy Carlson, who owns an Ace store in Denver and is on the group’s board. “He wound up coming in to one of our stores and buying ladybugs.” Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, a video-sharing site for business use, advises putting some thought into picking the terms you search on Twitter, just as you would for meta tags. “Research the most frequently searched terms in your market on Google and other search engines,” he says. “Then search or monitor those terms on Twitter.
Deal with disgruntled customers -- fast. One evening Ace customers posted an angry tweet because a tool he’d bought from a Denver area store broke after one use. “We got in touch, recommended which store he should go to to return the item, and alerted the manager at that store,” Carlson says. “He didn’t know that Ace hand tools all carry a lifetime guarantee.” The man was very impressed, and went from being angry at Ace to being a devoted Ace customer. The complaining tweet came through late at night, Carlson notes, well after the stores were closed. And, he says, it was especially important to intervene quickly. “You don’t know whether he’s going to go back to the store right away, or stew about it for three or four days and tell more people. The more time between the bad experience and the resolution, the more likely he is to tell his friends, so the quicker we can solve a problem, the better.”

And that’s the nice thing about Twitter, he says. “You can catch a problem when it happens, and do something about it.”