More specifically, according to a new report from the CMO Council (PDF) when respondents were asked about customer service online. One-third of respondents (33%) said they will post on a brand’s Facebook page when they need to communicate with the brand (while only 12% will tweet). When connecting with a brand online for customer service issues, 47% (nearly half) of respondents expect a response within 24 hours; 22% expect a response immediately, and 19% expect a response within an hour.
So what do you do when you have a customer service question on Facebook that you can’t answer?
Follow the 3Ts of online customer service:
1. Provide a timely response
2. Tell the truth
3. State a turnaround time
It’s ok to say “I don’t know but let me investigate and respond by the end of the day.” If you are diligent and still don’t have an answer then post again about your progress and ask to take it offline. Provide an email address and ask the customer to contact you there so you can more easily stay in touch.
Any response to a customer service question is better than no response.
The CMO Council study found that when asked what customers think it means to “like” a brand on Facebook 49% said they “like” a brand because they are already loyal customers.
Loyal customers expect brands to be listening. I believe that most people don’t expect brands to be listening 24/7 but that they do, as the study suggests, expect a timely response. A Facebook response time of 24 hours is good but ideally you’d provide a response within an hour, especially if it’s during business hours.
A timely, truthful response is better than a fake response.
Don’t say you’re going to investigate and then never report back. Don’t make up an answer when you really don’t know the answer. And certainly don’t tell a lie. Getting caught out in a lie or half truth is worse for brand management than offering a brief, true statement.
A timely, truthful response that offers a turnaround time is the best customer service response.
When you need to take your time to provide a quality response, buy some time by providing a brief initial response with a turnaround time for a full reply. Then stick to your turnaround time.
Speed of response should not be confused with quality or depth. Customer expectations are high when engaging with brands online so manage expectations by providing an initial response that is timely, truthful and offers a turnaround time for a response. Then do what you say you’re going to do, and follow up within that timeframe.
Being responsive to online customer service questions, complaints and feedback is essential to good social media marketing and keeping customers engaged with your brand. Do you have any stories or examples to share?
Corporate storytelling is no small feat. But telling the company story is key to online success. The internet is a giant web of conversations. It’s people talking to people, and the most engaging conversations tell stories.
We know this yet when we sit down to write our company about page or the boilerplate for a press release, the storytelling and conversation disappear. We are left with uninteresting factoids.
Storytelling is important. It builds understanding, emotional connections and develops relationships. All things companies want. So don’t forfeit the conversation. The stories we tell through conversation give people a reason to retell our company story, to talk about our ideas, to share.
Organizational Storytelling: How do you find something interesting to talk about?
Start by understanding the stories that are most engaging. These are the ones that recur throughout history:
1. Overcoming the Monster (learning and dealing with a threat)
2. Rags to Riches (going from nothing to everything)
3. The Quest (Hello Frodo. Desperately seeking something, often with companions)
4. Voyage and Return (triumph over madness and a return to stability)
5. Comedy (experience without consequence)
6. Tragedy (the spiral into darkness)
7. Rebirth (the spiral into darkness but wait ... there’s the light)
These 7 basic plots of storytelling can be used to create your company vision, value proposition, messaging and elevator pitch. It’s all about finding a point of view that is interesting.
In my experience there are 9 corporate storytelling themes that get people talking and listening (thanks to the book Beyond Buzz for twigging me to this). I keep these in mind when I’m writing an organization’s About page, press releases or blog articles.
1. Anxieties (what is the audience concerned about, how does this product or service address those fears)
2. Contrarian (is there a controversy that should be addressed)
3. Personal stories (how can I give a personal voice to the story, what human-interest points are there)
4. Counterintuitive (can I pull back the curtain to reveal that things are not as they seem)
5. David vs. Goliath (are we a small player pitted against a giant, and are likely to win)
6. Aspirational (what’s the big hairy audacious goal)
7. Avalanche about to roll (nobody likes to miss out on something big, how can I convey that in the organizational story)
8. How to (what are the practical steps or lessons to impart)
9. Glitz and glam (is there a celebrity angle, a wow factor)
Spend a couple of minutes today and think about what view point or basic plot resonates most with your company story, then go rewrite that terribly bland About page.
Google Places is Google’s version of a local business directory. Listings appear in Google search results under Places, with pins that locate businesses on a Google map. Google Places is excellent for online marketing because it’s a free and easy tool that boosts your website’s SEO and increases your chances of getting found online.
Unfortunately, what’s not easy about Google Places (as I recently found out) is figuring out how to enable it on your Google Apps account. Through trial and error here are the steps I took to enable Google Places on one of our clients’ Google Apps Account.
How to Enable Google Places on Your Google Apps Account
If Google Places isn’t enabled on your Google Apps Account, you’ll get the message: “This Service is Not Available. Google Places is not available for [your domain name].”
To fix this, you need to go to the Google Apps administrator control panel: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/your-domain-name.com (your primary domain name is the domain name you used to sign up for Google Apps).
Go into the Organizations & users tab and click on the Services tab.
You’ll see a list of the core Google Apps services that are already enabled (Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.). Scroll down to the Other Google Services section and look for Google Places. Click “On” to enable.
Social media marketing campaigns can be divided into two modes—maintenance mode and outreach mode.
Maintenance mode includes the regular, every-day running of your campaign. This could involve posting tweets on Twitter, monitoring comments on your blog, or engaging with fans on Facebook. During maintenance mode, you should plan to spend 2 hours per channel a week running your campaign.
Outreach mode, on the other hand, involves a concentrated effort to build buzz about your brand. This can include running a contest and trying to get contest entries or pitching a story and trying to get bloggers to spread your story via word of mouth. Because outreach campaigns require a lot of effort and online buzz dies down quickly, outreach campaigns run for a short period of time, usually less than 3 months. Expect to spend 25-35 hours on a 2-4 week campaign.
We recommend running outreach campaigns 2-4 times a year (depending on the size and scope of your campaigns) and spending the rest of the year on maintenance. Thinking of your social media strategy in these modes helps make managing your campaign easier.
Of course, the overarching question is how to manage your to-do list on a day-to-day level. Since we’re still sorting that out ourselves, here are two links from Harvard Business Review that have been helpful:
What are blogs?
Blogs are networked environments of people with shared interests. A metaphor that we like at Boxcar Marketing is that if the internet is a big party, then bloggers are clusters of people having a conversation.
Who is blogging?
Everyone and anyone with something to say.
Why do we want to reach out to bloggers?
Because bloggers are journalists, and if our story is a good match for their blog’s audience, then we might have an interesting conversation with them and they might considering sharing some of that information with their readers.
There are two parts of Blogger Outreach.
1. Finding Bloggers
When finding bloggers, we basically search for them using any means possible. Google Search is our starting point. With well researched keyword phrases we can quickly suss out the top ranking blogs or lead bloggers in a particular niche. Even a general search for “[subject matter] + blog” will establish a strong starting point for your research.
Advanced Twitter search, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Ning, Bing and Google Blog search are other resources we use to reinforce what we learned from our initial Google searches. Even reviewing a blog’s blogroll helps to construct our understanding of the niche and the connections between bloggers.
When researching bloggers, it’s important to document your research in a useful, organized manner. For our own blogger outreach we create an excel grid that documents:
Other details that will be useful when pitching, such as a blogger’s defined pitching specifications or the URL of a specific blog post that relates to the story we want to pitch.
2. Pitching Bloggers
Once you’ve found the right bloggers to pitch, remember that pitching is like joining a conversation at a cocktail party. Here are the party rules:
Use your human voice, not your marketing machine, monotone voice.
Individual attention: do not send out the same spammy email to a lot of bloggers. They know each other. They’ll post your marketing spam. They’ll taunt you. They will know it’s the same email everyone got. You have to find a way to be efficient but still individualize the content.
Hi Susan is better than Hello blogger. Hi Susan is also good if the blogger’s name is Susan, if it’s Sally, you’re in trouble. Get the name right.
Be generous. Pitching is not about what you want, it’s about identifying why the blogger’s audience could benefit from the information you have to share.
Show that you get it. Provide a link upfront. Be brief. Provide interesting information. Then get out of the way.
PRWeb, a press release distribution service specializing in online visibility for small business, has also kindly provided further tips on contacting bloggers.
Do your research! Don’t send a press release or pitch to bloggers any information that they may not be interested in. It’s the fastest way to get blacklisted and you run the risk of having them blog negatively about you or your company.
Before sending a press release or pitch to a blogger, get to know them on a personal level first. Have a casual conversation with them and offer helpful resources or tips. You can do this by commenting on their blogs and adding your opinion to their posts, providing insightful articles that follow up on the topic of a post they did, or point them in the direction of a source that might be able to weigh in on a topic they recently highlighted.
Summarize your most important points. Try sending a clever, relevant and succinct pitch with a link to your press release instead of just sending the release. Doing so shows that you have taken the time to get to know the blogger, that you have personalized your news to their needs, and that you respect their time and right to follow up on the information or not. If your topic is compelling, they will click—and they will appreciate that you’ve distilled the relevant information they need. This is often preferable to sending the full press release with company boilerplate or cramming all the information into a long email that will likely get scanned then tossed.
PRWeb also has an upcoming webinar with Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter Out) on big publicity ideas for small business success. Visit the webinar page for more information.
In today’s environment, successful public relations needs to incorporate social media.
Social media can enhance your public relations efforts because of the potential for word of mouth and how quickly and easily conversations can spread online.
Social media has changed how you write and send out a press release. The purpose of an online press release is to increase the visibility of your news, improve your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website or a particular landing page. In addition, you also want to encourage online media and bloggers to pick up the story and blog about it, tweet about it, etc. in order to spread online word of mouth.
Best Practices For Social Media Press Releases:
Title: The title of your press release should be about 60 - 80 characters to ensure that the full title is displayed in search results. Think of the keywords that you want your press release to rank for and be sure to use them in your title.
Body: The body of your press release should be under 500 words. This means that your press release needs to be concise and to the point. Think about what story you need to tell and what story the media will care about. What’s the primary story? What’s the secondary story? What It Takes to Run a Successful Contest talks about the SPHERE approach, which is also applicable for press releases.
Again, use the keywords that you want to rank for in search engines.
Links: Make sure to include a link to where you want people to go. Do you want people to go to a specific landing page? Your Facebook page? Your homepage? What’s the call to action for your press release or where can readers get more information? The link should be near the beginning of the press release because some sites will only post the first few lines of your release. We usually repeat this link near the end, too.
Sharable Content: Include content that is easily shared, like a corporate video, logo image or photos. What can bloggers use if they decide to write about your news? Make it easy for them to share your story.
Consider creating a media or press page on your website where you can direct the media for more information as well as provide content they can use. Here’s an example of a media landing page that we created for a recent contest we were running: http://pages.foodtree.com/media-room-so-nice-a-better-organic-world-contest/.
Notice that we have included Twitter share links, a sample Facebook post and badges, logos and photos that the media could use.
Distribution: There are various online wire services that you can use. We like to use PRWeb because we seem to get the most coverage and the best search engine ranking when we use it. It costs $140 for the Standard package and $200 for the Advanced. The benefit of the Advanced package is that your press release can go out the next day, whereas with the Standard package you have to wait 2 days.
Once your press release has been sent out, don’t stop there. Promote your press release on all of your social media channels incuding your company blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Promote it wherever interested parties are likely to be looking for news.
Coming up in our next post: Using your press release in blogger outreach.
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