The Tendo View » Siobhan Nash

Social doesn’t equal service—you need a strategy

Siobhan Nash — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:39:42 +0000

Increasingly, companies are turning to social media channels like Twitter to address customer service issues. As a real-time customer touch point, social networks provide a great opportunity to keep a current customer loyal or win over prospective customers by responding quickly to their questions and complaints. However, does that mean a company should or needs to respond to every customer Facebook post and tweet?

A recent eMarketer article suggests no, companies “don’t need to respond to every ounce of negative buzz.” The article suggests letting other customers (or brand advocates) address some of the problems. That strategy can backfire, though, if a number of customer questions go unanswered. For example, 49.5 percent of respondents in a Conversocial survey said they’d be far less likely to buy anything from a company that had unanswered complaints or inquiries on their social sites.

If customer questions are bogging down your brand page on social sites and your social media team, consider establishing a separate page for customer service-related issues. For example, Comcast’s @comcastcares and Delta Airline’s @DeltaAssist pages on Twitter are good examples of companies successfully setting up a separate presence to handle customer issues.

If the thought of managing multiple pages makes your head spin and you’re not going to address customer concerns on your brand page, consider directing customers to where they can get help. For example, Virgin Airlines offers a clear statement in its Twitter bio: “Although we won’t address specific guest service issues on Twitter, our team of experts is eager to help you at http://vgn.am/GstHlp or call 1-877-359-8474.” This is also a good tactic if you’re in an industry that deals with sensitive personal and/or financial information, such as banks.

If your company is constrained either by budget or resources—or both—and you know you won’t be able to respond to every customer question that comes in over the virtual transom, I recommend establishing criteria to help prioritize the questions you should respond to. Consider whether the problem or question is related to any of following:

Brand reputation
Product quality
Safety
A potential legal issue

When you do respond to customer complaints, keep in mind that it matters not only what you say, but also how you say it.

Are you using social sites to field customer service issues? How do you determine which questions or complaints to respond to?

Get a grip on your content

Siobhan Nash — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:27:46 +0000

Every year I go through a spate of cleaning in late December—combing through paperwork and other detritus that’s piled up during the year. I like to purge the old before I start adding anything new. While busily working through the year’s accumulation a couple weeks ago, it occurred to me that this same practice should be applied to your content.

Content marketing has hit its stride and entered the marketing mainstream. According to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) study, 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget this year; that’s up 9 percent from 2011.

Before you start creating content in earnest, however, you need a strategy. And before you can create a strategy, you need to get a handle on the content you already have. That means cataloging all of your content—and not just what resides on your website. This list includes:

•   apps
•   articles
•   blog posts
•   case studies
•   newsletters (print and digital)
•   interactive content
•   magazines (print and digital)
•   mobile content
•   podcasts
•   presentations
•   slideshows
•   social media
•   tools (such as an online calculator)
•   videos
•   webinars/webcasts
•   white papers

It’s also a good practice to audit the content you’ve posted on sites such as YouTube, SlideShare, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

At Tendo, we recommend auditing your content at least once a year, preferably every six months. If a lot of the content you’re creating is time-sensitive (as opposed to evergreen), you should consider auditing your content quarterly.

Audience and goals
When taking an inventory of your content, think about the target audience for the content and what stage of the buying cycle it addresses. Ideally, you want a mix of content that targets all your audiences at each stage of the buying cycle. Focus your content creation efforts on the gaps your clean-up exercise uncovers.

Consider, too, whether the content type is the most appropriate and effective for the topic. For example, a customer success story currently executed in HTML or as a PDF on your website may be more effective and reach a broader audience as a video on YouTube.

Finally, review all content for how well it addresses your business goals. You may have a plethora of case studies for acquiring new customers but a dearth of content aimed at retaining your customers. Keep the distribution channel in mind, too. Different channels are more effective outlets depending on the goal. If one of your company goals is brand awareness, then sharing your content on Twitter makes sense. But if you want to improve your company’s thought leadership in the industry, a webinar or SlideShare presentation would be a more appropriate distribution channel.

Creating a variety of engaging content—and enough of it—is a challenge for most businesses. Knowing what content you currently have will help you decide what you want to keep, revise, or repurpose, or get rid of altogether. From there, you can focus your efforts on creating content to fill the gaps.

When was the last time you cataloged your company’s content?

Getting started: Measuring social media

Siobhan Nash — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:22:43 +0000

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t come across at least one article, blog post, or newsletter about measuring social media success, in particular ROI. According to a recent eMarketer article, the pressure is on marketers to focus more on gathering solid metrics to gauge social marketing ROI.

Interestingly, while there is some push from the executive suite to show how social media is contributing to the bottom line, only 13 percent of respondents in Chief Marketer’s “2011 Social Marketing Survey” said they’re very effective at measuring social campaigns. A whopping 40 percent of those surveyed admitted they were either not very or not at all effective in determining whether their social media efforts are delivering results.

If you fall into that 40 percent of marketers who aren’t effectively measuring your social media, proving ROI is a big leap forward. It’s best to start small, then work up to more strategic measurement goals. In other words, you need to walk before you can run. If you haven’t been measuring any social media or only sporadically checking out your metrics provided by the given social channel, such as Facebook Insights, where do you begin? Here are some tips to get you started measuring social media success.

Choose your objectives
Whether it’s for a specific campaign or your social media program in general, you need to identify your goals. Because until you know where you’re going, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve arrived. Many of you (hopefully) identified the goals for your campaign or program at the outset. If not, following are some objectives to consider:

Building relationships
Increasing awareness
Improving reputation
Driving traffic
Taking action

It’s best to limit your objectives. This will help focus your social media efforts, which in turn will make measuring results and success easier. Adhere to good project management form by making sure your objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based—otherwise known as SMART.

Also, think about what’s trackable in the social channels you use. For example, if you have a company blog, you can track comments, page views, and RSS opens and click through. For Twitter, you can measure replies and retweets. Knowing what you can track can help inform the objectives you choose.

Identify what to measure
Once you’ve determined your social media objectives, you can begin identifying what to measure to support those objectives. For example, if your goal is to build relationships, you could track the increase in fans or followers as well as comments and @mentions. If increasing awareness is one of your objectives, you can measure the number of shares, likes, retweets, page views, and linkbacks that a particular piece of content generates.

Think measuring likes and followers seems elementary? Consider this: 60 percent of respondents in the Chief Marketer survey still count the number of fans, followers, friends, and likes as their top metric.

Collect the data
Now that you’ve settled on your objectives and what you’re going to track in order to prove the success of your social media efforts, you need to collect the data. This can be easier than it sounds. Many of the social channels you’re probably using provide some analytics capabilities, such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. And sharing services like AddThis provide analytics, too. That low-hanging fruit is easy data pickin’s.

For channels that don’t provide their own analytics, there are a plethora of tools that you can use to track social media activity—some of which are free or inexpensive, like TwentyFeet. Even if your social channels provide analytics, it’s a good idea to use a few different sources for collecting data. Each tool tracks data a little differently and can give you a different view. Also, using multiple sources is a good way to confirm the numbers.

Don’t forget to collect qualitative data, as well. Examples of customer comments and tweets show how they’re engaging with your company or brand.

How are you measuring your social media efforts?

Negative reviews: Don’t bury your head in the sand

Siobhan Nash — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:54:28 +0000

They’re out there—negative reviews of your company’s products or services. Although you might prefer to look the other way, responding to negative reviews can have a positive impact on your company’s perception among customers. In a recent Maritz Research and evolve24 study, 83 percent of Twitter complainants who received a reply liked or loved that the company responded. That means a company was able to improve customer psychology 83 percent of the time by just acknowledging the problem and showing it was listening.

Keep in mind, though, that how you respond matters. When it comes to negative reviews, the old adage “It’s not just what you say but how you say it” is true. Remember, you’re talking to customers who are frustrated and unhappy. You want to provide them with the help and answers they’re looking for—not add fuel to their fire.

Here are some tips to help you write responses to turn negative reviews into positive perception:

Be friendly and courteous. Get off on the right foot by addressing the customer by name and acknowledging their experience. A little empathy, such as, “Sorry to hear about your experience!,” can go a long way in soothing an agitated customer. Finally, thank the customer for his or her comments. Even if the feedback is negative, it’s helpful information for improving your products in the future.
Be truthful and authentic. If a customer is correct in identifying an issue with your product or service, acknowledge it. Don’t hide behind a bunch of marketing speak; be honest and forthcoming if there’s a known problem with your product. Also, don’t use boilerplate responses. It shouldn’t appear that you’re just cutting and pasting approved corporate responses from a messaging guide. Talk to the customer as if you’re having a conversation with a real person, because you are.
Be specific in addressing customer issues. The more detailed information or steps you can provide customers on how to resolve their problems, the better.
Ask for additional details. Too often, customers don’t provide enough details in their reviews to accurately assess the problem and provide a suitable solution. Some forums and e-commerce sites provide the ability for customers to comment on a manufacturer’s response. In those cases, respond by asking for additional information about the issue so you can more effectively troubleshoot the problem.
Encourage customers to contact support. It sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but oftentimes you’ll find that customers post their reviews at the moment of their frustration without taking the first, most obvious step to resolve their issue: calling support. If your company provides different support centers or vehicles (phone vs. online), direct the customer to the most relevant support option for their product or situation.
Provide a direct path to additional information. Whatever you do, don’t send the customer to your home page. Remember, you’re trying to improve the customers’ experience so you want to get them to the information they need in the fewest number of clicks. Whether it’s product specifications, a replacement model, or a software upgrade, provide the specific URL for that information.
Create a “triage” email alias. Sometimes customers do call support and, unfortunately, sometimes their problems go unresolved. For those situations, create a special email address that you can provide as a way for customers to contact you directly so you can help escalate their support case.

Finally, don’t ignore the customers who are saying good things about your products or company online. Make sure you respond to positive reviews, too. Statistics show that peer reviews are one of the most influential factors when making purchasing decisions. It’s worth your time to say “thank you” to your brand advocates.

You can run, but you can’t hide from bad reviews, and it’s in your best interest not to. Proactively addressing negative reviews is a great opportunity to develop better customer relationships, gain valuable feedback about your products, and improve the perception of your company.

What best practices do you have for responding to reviews from unhappy customers?

Keep customers engaged past the purchase

Siobhan Nash — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:33:35 +0000

Part of the marketer’s job is to help identify new customers and to keep existing customers engaged. However, many B2B companies are more focused on the former in an effort to generate sales leads, whereas B2C businesses do a better job of understanding their customers, according to a recent eMarketer article. Although there’s a bigger need for content that addresses the early stages of the sales cycle for B2Bs, it’s important to create content that reaches beyond the purchase to keep current customers happy.

To do that, you need to know your audience—their needs, their preferences, and their behaviors. Without that vital information, you can’t create content that effectively builds awareness; impacts a potential customer’s decision to purchase your product or service; or keeps current customers engaged with your company, resulting in repeat business or referrals.

When it comes to creating content, perhaps it’s better to think of the customer experience as an hourglass rather than a funnel, as Tricia Smith suggests in a recent SmartBrief post. This would ensure you’re meeting the needs of current customers, creating information resources that are useful after they’ve made a purchase. For example, start a community on your site where customers can help each other or provide the ability to post reviews of your product or service. And these resources can be a great well of information that you can then use to create new content to help build brand awareness, for example.

This underscores a best practice we mention often to our clients: Content types and topics should be appropriate to your audience and their goals—as well as your company’s objectives. White papers, how-to articles, and webcasts are helpful for addressing the awareness and consideration stages of the sales cycle, for example, whereas online demos and case studies are useful for influencing the purchasing decision.

Finally, when you’re creating content for all phases of the sales cycle, don’t forget about SEO. A joint study (PDF) from Google and TechTarget highlights the importance of making sure your SEO efforts, such as keywords and titles, are specific to the particular stage of the sales cycle you’re targeting with your content.

What content are you creating to keep current customers engaged with your company?

Want to improve your search ranking? Create content

Siobhan Nash — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:20:34 +0000

Often touted as a science because of algorithms and such, SEO at times seems more like an art. You follow the rules or best practices of the day, but the effort doesn’t always yield the desired result—higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). So, you try another approach. In this way, SEO is more akin to a spaghetti test—throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

Although search engines frequently tweak their algorithms, Google threw a significant curve ball when it changed its algorithm a couple months back. The search engine now assigns a lesser ranking to low-quality sites like “content farms” or others that use duplicate or recycled content.

The significance of this change is something we at Tendo have been advocating to our clients for years—content is key. If you want to ensure that your company gets found online, you need to create original, high-quality content. It’s this content that will create relevance for your site and improve your ranking on SERPs.

Producing new content on a regular basis certainly requires more time and effort. Here are a couple suggestions for creating original content:

Start a blog. This is a great way to generate a regular stream of content. And if you’re looking for fodder, listen to what your customers are saying on your social media channels and location-based services such as Foursquare.
Write on a topic important to your customers and/or to your industry. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just make sure to add your own unique take on the subject.
Use content you already have. If your company produces original research, in-depth reports, or other analysis pieces, turn those into a series of articles for your site.

In defense of keywords
Although meta information, keywords in particular, hasn’t been the key to SEO success in years, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. In fact, keywords are very important to your content. You should use language your customers use—not jargon or marketing speak—and base your content around those keywords. This will help make it clear to search engines that your page is relevant to those keywords. Also, you can use your keyword research to help identify themes for new content.

The only thing you can count on with SEO is that it will change. Creating informative content that’s relevant to your audience—customers, partners, or both—will ensure that your site gets found and give you the best chance at converting visitors into customers.

What’s your company’s strategy for creating original content for your website?

Social media: It’s all about timing

Siobhan Nash — Fri, 06 May 2011 01:21:27 +0000

We all do it. In our efforts to engage with our audience and provide them with quality content, we post what we have, when we have it, to all of our social media outlets without giving a second thought as to timing. You should. Timing your posts and updates to better coincide with a particular platform’s peak usage increases the likelihood that your content will be read and, more importantly, acted upon—whether that’s opening an email, sharing a link, or commenting on a blog.

I recently attended two presentations that discussed this issue of social media timing—one from HubSpot and one from our own Tendo social media expert Charlotte Ziems. Here are some highlights about timing for four key social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, email, and blogs:

Facebook
• Content posted before noon gets 65 percent more engagement than contented posted later in the day
• Friday posts generate the most engagement, followed by Monday and Tuesday
• Saturday and Sunday posts generate the least engagement but the highest number of shares

Twitter
• Twitter updates are retweeted more often when posted later in the day, as well as late in the week
• Click-through rates (CTRs) are highest mid-morning and early evening
• Mondays and Tuesdays yield the lowest CTRs

Blogs
• Twice as many blogs are read in the morning than at night
• Viewing is highest on Mondays and lowest on Saturdays
• Commenting is highest in the morning and on Saturdays, and lowest on Wednesdays

Email
• More email is opened on Saturdays and Sundays (early in the morning) than during the week
• Sending emails more frequently improves click-through rates and doesn’t result in higher unsubscribe rates

The takeaway from this research confirms something we’ve all heard before: the more frequent your activity, the better the response—and that can be further improved by timing your updates and posts accordingly. Try experimenting with the timing of your social media activity; for example, consider sending an email early in the morning and on a weekend and see what the metrics reveal.

Have you noticed certain days and times work better for your social media activity on some platforms? We’d love to hear about it!

Content curation: aggregation with a new name?

Siobhan Nash — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:59:00 +0000

Content aggregation has been around as long as the Internet. Then it was the likes of AOL and Excite@Home; now it’s Google News, AllTop, and Reddit. But there’s another seemingly similar term that’s floating around with increasing frequency—content curation. The question that keeps popping up is this: Is curation the same as aggregation, just with a more fashionable name?

The answer is no. Content aggregation, the automatic gathering of links, merely presents content that’s related by broad topic, such as business, politics, and sports. However, there’s no connection—no theme—tying the individual articles together.

Content curation picks up where aggregation leaves off, requiring human intervention in the form of editorial judgment and organization. Just as a museum curator assembles a collection of artwork based on a theme (such as an artist, a period, etc.), a content curator pulls together related content on a particular topic from a variety of sources to tell a complete story.

There are several benefits to curating content on your company website. By gathering and presenting targeted material, you help establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. As well, you become the go-to source for prospects in the decision-making process. By promoting curated content on your social media platforms, you help drive traffic to your site and further your efforts to create a community of users interested in the industries your products and solutions address.

You can even curate your own content if you’re a large company with multiple business units. Pulling together related content on a topic from your various microsites gets you more bang for your content creation buck. At Tendo, this is a best practice we espouse daily: write once, use many. And for highly regulated industries, like financial services, curating content can be a viable alternative when tight restrictions make creating content difficult.

When curating content, make sure to give credit where credit’s due and attribute articles, blog posts, videos, etc. to the original creator, if it isn’t your company.

Do you currently curate content on your site? Tell us what the benefits have been for your company.

If you’re interested in reading more about curation, check out my colleague Linda Leung’s post about Pearltrees.com—a social curation tool.

3 corporate blogs that set the standard

Siobhan Nash — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:17:38 +0000

Blogs continue to abound as companies realize their value as a marketing tool. Facebook and Twitter may be great for updating your followers (many of whom aren’t necessarily your customers) on your company’s latest news and offers, but blogs excel at supporting key business goals, such as lead generation and brand marketing. According to eMarketer, “…the percentage of U.S. companies that use blogs for marketing purposes will rise to 43% in 2012, from 34% in 2010.”

Much like communities, your blog isn’t all about your company. It’s not about telling your customers what you want them to know; it’s about engaging them on topics that matter to them and address their needs.

Some B2B and B2C blogs do this better than others. Here are three blogs that I think succeed at one or more best practices.

Salesforce.com: The company’s CloudBlog touts itself as “An industry view with altitude.” But this tagline is more than a clever turn of phrase. It delivers on the implied promise—higher-level industry insight. The tone is conversational but opinionated. The posts convey information effectively, using bullet points, graphics, and embedded rich media to break up the content. Finally, the writers successfully connect the topics to the company’s mission and goals without making a blatant “pitch.”

Dell: A lot of companies, especially larger ones, have more than one blog to serve various audiences and industry segments. But if your audience can’t find the blog they’re interested in, what’s the point? Dell has one of the better landing pages I’ve seen for organizing multiple blogs. In addition to a clean, simple design, this landing page offers a feed of the latest posts, a search option (which I haven’t seen very often), and a blog directory—both at the top of the page and in the right margin, which also includes brief descriptions of the various blogs.

O’Reilly Media: This one is a little off the beaten path, as O’Reilly Media is a technology book publishing company. But the company’s blog, O’Reilly Radar, excels at something I believe is essential to connecting with your audience—defining the writers. Just as many of us don’t like interacting with phonebots, your customers aren’t likely to engage with your company if your blog posts are penned by faceless (sometimes nameless) writers. O’Reilly provides a photo, a link to profile information, and a Twitter handle for every writer.

Room for improvement
Although these companies exemplify some of blogging’s best practices, no blog is perfect. Where I think most companies fall short is in burying access to their blogs at the bottom of the home page. There are a couple corporate websites, like HP and Salesforce.com, that provide links “above the fold.” GM does one better, making the “News & Conversations” link the first tab at the top of its home page. A link higher on the home page is good, but more, higher-profile real estate for promoting your blogs and inviting visitors to participate would be even better.

You can find more examples of successful corporate blogs on Mashable.

What do you think makes for a successful corporate blog?

Email vs. social media: Sharing habits differ

Siobhan Nash — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:15:18 +0000

In a recent post , I stated that email was still a key marketing tool—even in the wake of newer channels like social media. This got me thinking about my email and social media habits as a consumer.

I receive a lot of email (newsletters, promotions, etc.) from a variety of brands. I also follow many of these same companies on Facebook. Even though they’re delivering much of the same content via status updates that I receive in their emails, I haven’t unsubscribed to most of the emails. Why? A couple reasons.

First, there’s a high probability that I’ll miss a company’s message in my Facebook News Feed. Unlike the majority of Facebook users, I prefer the Most Recent to the default Top News News Feed option. This means my News Feed includes updates from everyone I’m “friends” with. So, chances are good I’m going to miss an update (or two or three) from the companies I follow. Similarly, unless customers are regularly interacting with your company on Facebook, your status updates won’t appear in their Top News feeds.

Second, I prefer sharing content via email than via social media channels. It’s easier. For example, there isn’t always a Share option for content I find on Facebook. Also, an email often provides more information, and this helps me determine whether it’s something I want to share. That’s not to say I don’t share content on Facebook, I just don’t do it with the regularity that I forward emails onto friends, family, and colleagues.

Apparently I’m not alone in this behavior. A recent study by SocialTwist found that 55 percent of sharing happens via email while only 24 percent of sharing occurs by social media. That said, according to the study, social media content garners more click throughs than email—60 percent vs. 31 percent, respectively. That holds true for me; I click through more on Facebook, as it’s the only way to read the entire message or access the promoted content.

Both email and social media are valuable for sharing content. However, as Jay Baer recently pointed out, “…the connections between companies and their email subscribers are far stronger than the connections between companies and their social media subscribers.”

A customer who “likes” your company on Facebook or follows your brand on Twitter may show passion, but it doesn’t show commitment. What it does show is the potential for a fan or follower to become a customer. Using your social media channels to get them to subscribe to your emails offers a better opportunity to convert them into an actual customer.

What channels are your customers using most often to share content?