Have you found Twitter and LinkedIn useful for business?
I’m intrigued to know how many individuals have found Twitter and LinkedIn useful for business. I asked this question a few months ago on a LinkedIn group that I am a member of. It was interesting to see what responses people had. I asked the question as I wanted to hear more about other people’s personal experiences, so when I help people set up their own accounts I have other examples apart from my own experiences.
From asking the question and looking through similar questions on other LinkedIn groups many people indicated that simply having a presence on LinkedIn and Twitter, and engaging in the social communities resulted in enquiries. I have found the same results personally and professionally.
When I worked for a membership association I was often personally contacted on LinkedIn for more information about the association. In that position I implemented a twitter account which also resulted in people contacting us. Being a membership association, businesses would often seek us out and contact us, but we also found by engaging and interacting in different forums we helped to put our name out there, gain more credibility and show what we were all about.
Recently I found Twitter personally helpful as I was looking for a designer to create me some personal business cards. Being relatively new in London I hadn’t yet met anyone who was quite right or knew enough people to be able to recommend someone, so I turned to Twitter for help. My tweet was quickly followed up by a person who suggested I try @Jilly_Pepper. Interestingly as soon as one person recommended her I realised that we had several Twitter friends in common and ones that I trusted and had engaged with on twitter who could back up the tweet recommendation. The designs she created were great and I am excited to receive my business cards in the next couple of days.
I am still interested to hear about other people’s experiences as it is interesting to see what has worked for different people and businesses – so please do share.
Is it possible to separate your personal life and work life on social networks like LinkedIn?
Image via CrunchBase
Many individuals join professional social networks like LinkedIn for their own professional development rather than as brand ambassadors for their work.
Over the last year I have engaged with many people on social media platforms and have found it hard to separate the two on some networks such as LinkedIn. In my last position for a membership organisation, I often was personally contacted on LinkedIn and Twitter about the organisation. This led me to think about how, if I should or if I even could separate work from play.
Like many people I know I initially joined LinkedIn for my professional development and to keep in touch with contacts who I have met through networking, events and work. At first I wasn’t too sure what I thought of people contacting me directly about my work seeking more information. But it made sense as people like dealing with people who they can put a face and name to. Inevitably if you work in marketing and are doing your job properly you will probably end up becoming a brand ambassador whether you like it or not. If you do not want to be a brand ambassador for your company then perhaps you should rethink what and who you should work for.
With the explosion of social media not only the marketing team and stakeholders need to be brand advocates – all employees need to be as well. Employers also have to take care in making sure all staff will represent their brand in the right light or at the least don’t do the opposite. This does not mean that every employee has to be out there promoting the brand and company through their social networks, but that they should at least know how to respond and act. For example, if an individual asks for information about their workplace via LinkedIn employees should know how to respond and direct them to the right person who can help in their organisation.
Ultimately, my active use of social media over the years for work and play has highlighted how important it is to become a brand ambassador for my work. To me, this can only be done if I am passionate and believe in the organisation I work for. This is now a key factor in my job hunt for my next London marketing role!
I am interested to hear whether you have had the same experience and/or whether you have chosen to keep the two separate?
Helpful websites and links – Delicious
Just a quick post to let you know that I have started to use Delicious and you can find me at http://www.delicious.com/LivvyMarketing. For those of you who do not know what Delicious is, it is a ‘social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage, and share web pages from a centralized source’ (www.delicious.com/help/about).
If you own your own business it’s also quite interesting to pop in your business url to see who has added you to their bookmarks. It is good to see who is an advocate and/or sees your business website or webpage as being worthwhile to visit.
I personally find it quite useful, as I often access the internet on several different computers at work and home, my iPod touch and iPad, so I always have to re-save my bookmarks. According to Wikipedia, Delicious has been around since September 2003 and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
Another benefit from using Delicious for bookmarking is instead of putting your bookmarks into folders you simply list all the keywords (tags) that relate to the website or page. This makes it easier to find saved bookmarks – especially if you are someone like me who in the past bookmarked many pages on my web browser, then got overwhelmed with the amount of folders and sub folders I had. Not to mention that when I upgraded my laptop I lost them all.
The bigger picture
Think about the bigger picture – especially when recruiting
Recently I was at a Social Media Club event and started talking to a woman about jobs. We both found it very frustrating and quite simply rude when you apply for a job, have several interviews and consequently never hear back, or if you do it is via a generic rejection letter.
Even though it takes time to personally contact applicants it is still important that you do. For example, a few years back I applied for a job at an agency and had several long interviews with each of the directors. I knew I was up against some tough competition, and since they weren’t too sure whether to go for a senior marketer or someone with a bit less experience, the applicants they interviewed ranged hugely in experience.
The agency took a long time to say which applicant they were taking on and their form of rejection was a plain generic email. Now the generic email part was a bit of an insult. Fair enough if you hadn’t had an interview then the email was adequate, but as I had several interviews I expected at the least an email saying thank you for coming in for the interviews. Ideally, I believe you should ring everyone at this stage to let them know why. I do understand that they most likely did not have time to ring everyone and probably had a similar excuse for the poor email, but to me it’s an example of their poor communication skills.
Now you might be thinking what does it matter? Well to me it does as in all of my jobs from time to time I have had to find and use an agency. When choosing an agency for a project the one key thing I look for and expect is excellent communication skills. Consequently I wont use that agency and not because they didn’t employ me but for their poor communication skills.
The woman I spoke with at the Social Media Club had a similar experience to mine. She interviewed several times for a position and never heard back. Getting tired of chasing them up she eventually gave up. Her less than perfect impression of the business has now hindered her business from becoming involved with them and the business in question could have benefited from this.
It is more beneficial than you think, looking beyond what is right in front of you and thinking of the bigger picture. Sometimes people will simply hold a grudge no matter which way you let them down, however it’s better to know that you have communicated in the best way that you could. And in my experience, especially when recruiting marketers there is a great chance that they could end up becoming a client and/or a business partner, so always have the bigger picture in mind.
Custom made Social Media Monitoring Centers
Image via Wikipedia
Today I read a great article by John Lai (Social Media NZ) about Dell. Dell is the second company who has decided to create their own Social Media Command Centre and are using Radian6 to help them build a custom monitoring tool. The first company to do this was Gatorade and you can read a bit about their command centre in a blog by Adam Ostrow on Mashable.
John puts the question whether companies need to build their own command centres – I think that now we will only see big companies like Dell doing this. However, as monitoring social media becomes more the norm and part of everyday business it might also become the norm to build your own command centre. Although the biggest hurdle for most businesses will be getting the right resource to support a command centre and for small businesses, unless they see the benefit it might just not happen.
I believe Dell is smart in creating their own Social Media Command Centre, as they have the money and resource to do it well. They will easily benefit from having their own Social Media Command Centre if they have the right platform to help them respond to what their customers are saying.
It will be interesting to see how Radian6 design and build Dell’s custom monitoring centre and how efficient it is. Down the track, I would like to see if they share with the social media world how their monitoring tool works and the possible successes they do or don’t have with it.
Like John Lai I also wonder if this is the start of all companies creating their own social monitoring tools.
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Simple tips/reminders for marketing emails
Test, test, test!!
I keep finding it so painful seeing emails that haven’t been tested before being sent out. The most recent one I received included an image that hadn’t been re-sized before placing it into the email body, which then stuffed up the whole format of the email. Some email systems will show the emails properly but others won’t, so make sure you test your email in as many email systems as possible i.e. Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail etc.
The other thing that frustrates me is New Zealand businesses email campaigns not including a unsubscribe option, which is mandatory as part of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007.
Businesses should create a checklist and go through it before sending out marketing emails. Below are a few quick things to check and make sure you have done correctly. These points are really for small businesses that don’t have the budget for proper email campaign software.
Include a unsubscribe facility
This can be as simple as stating that if you wish to unsubscribe from further communication to reply with unsubscribe in the subject line. I would also suggest merging in the recipients email address into the email (i.e. you are subscribed as bob@xtra.co.nz) as many people have other email addresses forwarded to them especially if it’s a business email. Please do not make the unsubscribe button as an image as if a recipient has their images set to off they will not be able to see it.
Place recipients in the BCC field
If you are sending out a bulk email from a standard email address and not a specific email campaign system make sure you put all recipients in the BCC field and not the TO field.
Resolution and Image size
Re-size images to the size you want before placing into your email and make sure the image resolution is low/small (around 92 dpi). If you do not have Photoshop or similar software, you can easily do this in Microsoft Office Picture Manager. To re-size images on Microsoft Office Picture Manager click on Picture, then Re-size and to change the resolution select Picture, then Compress Pictures.
Emails set as an image
Do not make your whole email one big image as not everyone will be able to read it (my gym constantly does this and sometimes the picture is quite pixellated and hard to read). Many people have their email settings set to not show images, and if they receive an email as a full image, they may not even bother to click on the view images button.
Subject line – do make sure you include text in the subject line and make sure it doesn’t say something like ‘Test Email’. You would be surprised how many emails I have received that have made this careless mistake.
Spelling and grammar
Check your spelling and grammar and don’t just rely on your computer spell check. If you were writing a letter you would check these things, so make some time to proof read your work. Ideally print it out and get someone else to proof read it.
Test, test, test!!
Make sure you test your email in as many email browsers as you can. Do all the links work? Do you have your contact details? Do you have a unsubscribe facility? Have you balanced text to images? Can you view the email in several email systems? Have you checked your spelling and grammar?
There are many other aspects and issues when you are sending out marketing/promotional emails, so this is only a taste of what you should know and check. For example, you should not send out bulk emails from your Outlook address as you are on the track of getting your IP address blacklisted and you don’t get any statistics on who has opened your email, but that’s a whole different topic for another blog post.
If you want to see some great examples of poor emails and more tips on the do’s and don’ts of email marketing, you should check out Jericho’s blog.
No security blankets for SMEs with social media
Small businesses are trying to keep up to speed with new age marketing and promotion through Social Media, yet many are making crucial mistakes and don’t realise until it’s too late.
Image via CrunchBase
Traditionally if a business wanted to promote themselves they would advertise through mediums such as print/newspapers, radio or television. When placing an advert small businesses would usually have at least some sort of security that if they were doing something illegal or wrong someone would pick it up and let them know before it was published.
However with Social Media anyone can jump on and initially post what you want without someone saying ‘hey you’re doing it wrong’ or ‘you will get banned from the site for doing that’. What I have noticed is that there are many small business owners who have heard that Facebook is great for promotion and brand awareness, so they jump on board before finding out how it should be done properly and without any guidance.
One major mistake that I keep on seeing time and time again is small businesses creating a Facebook page by setting up their profile as a personal profile instead of a fan/business page. This error and its possible consequences are not great as Facebook are continually banning businesses from doing this. It doesn’t matter if a business tries to play innocent as if they actually read the terms and conditions for setting up a profile they would know they were not complying. Mobilize Mail have recently done some research on New Zealand businesses on Facebook. They found that almost 90% of the businesses they surveyed were using a personal profile to promote their business! (Scoop article on Mobilize)
Some may think that it is quite harsh of Facebook to ban businesses who make that crucial mistake, but really for privacy reasons they are not. For example, when most people add a person as a friend on Facebook they do not add them to a limited profile (a privacy setting option). This means that if you accept a friend on your personal Facebook profile that is actually a business they will be able to see all your photos, access all your details that you have for only your friends to view.
Now you might think who would accept a friend request from a business? Well one example is a business where people sign up to their service and they then receive free drink vouchers for bars in their area. Who would say no to free drinks? As you can imagine they have quickly become popular. Not too long ago the business decided to create a Facebook page, but instead of being a fan page they created it under a personal profile. As you would expect many people have added the business as a friend.
With the consumer in mind, I expect many people have not thought about how much personal information they are inadvertently sharing with the business. With the business in mind, they now have a huge following on Facebook and all it will now take is Facebook noticing that they are a business and banning them from Facebook entirely and permanently. Probably the one lucky thing for this business is that at least they maintain their database through their website and will probably not lose too many fans from their profile being closed. However it will not have crossed many other small businesses and entrepreneurs minds to own their own database by taking fans off Facebook and gaining their details. As all it takes is making one mistake or Facebook making a judgement call for all those contacts and fans to disappear, and that goes for all social media.
Let’s face it, many of the small businesses who fall into this trap or make other crucial mistakes just don’t know what they are doing and don’t have the funds to use an agency to set it up for them and tell them what they should do. The question is as marketers do we say tough to all the businesses we see doing it wrong and let them eventually suffer the consequences or do we tell them out of our own good will? Considering that potentially 90% of New Zealand businesses are using Facebook the wrong way should we be more active and help those small businesses by getting out there and spreading the word?
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