The keys to offering great customer service with social media
Earlier this year, Harvard Business Review ran an article with the headline, “Your Company Should Be Helping Customers on Social.” I think that sums up the bottom line very well: You should be offering great customer service with social media. However, it does leave some details to be filled in and that’s where the picture can get complicated. There is no “one-size-fits-all” pattern for a small business that wants to offer great customer service with social media. Depending on the size and nature of your business, the appropriate strategy, tools and platforms change. We will look at the topic starting at the “entry level” and build from there. Your first platform When small businesses have only one active social media platform, Facebook is almost always the channel of choice. It has the biggest number of users and your small business can definitely use it to serve your customers. A friend was trying to get of a printer ink supplier’s mailing list and the unsubscribe link was not working. He found the company’s Facebook page, posted his problem and it was quickly solved. Even if you are limiting your social customer service to Facebook, you need to respond within an hour, and the sooner the better. Go beyond an hour and your customers will feel it. The downside of Facebook is that everyone can see everything posted and add their own comments. However, when they see you resolve an issue in a way that pleases customers, being able to witness that will have a positive impact on your business. Twitter for social customer service Twitter has been the platform of choice for companies both large and small that want to offer great customer service with social media. With 140 characters you can’t explain how to change the water filter on a counter depth side-by-side refrigerator…but you could send a link to a page or PDF that does give the complete instructions. Because messages are short and to the point – and generally responded to quickly – consumers seem to prefer Twitter for a customer service pipeline. Major corporations devote separate accounts dedicated to serving customers, like Best Buy’s @twelpforce. Being able to funnel a big percentage of customer service inquiries to your Twitter account can simplify operations. And if you want to go beyond merely providing great customer service with social media, to providing a great customer experience, Twitter can be very useful, but it does “up the ante.” To provide extra value to your customers, you need to be listening to your mentions in the social media. For example, a California hotel noted that a client due to arrive one day had tweeted that he looked forward to a spa visit. The hotel staff noted that and booked his time in advance. Social media listening As that example illustrates, social media listening has a role in proactive social media-based customer service systems. You can get started in social media listening by monitoring your mentions or specific hashtags in an app like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. There are more specialized services that will go further than mentions on Twitter, such as TopWalker and others. If you want to start “listening” you may want to know about every mention of your brand. Further, many small businesses that deal directly to consumers will...
read moreNeed to make changes in your small business? How to bring your team on board
See if this sounds familiar: You recognize that there’s an area that needs improvement in your small business. Maybe you need to replace some software you’re using, or change a system. Making the change is critical so you invest a lot of your time into researching to problem and available solutions so you can find what is absolutely the best way to move forward. You’re being diligent. You’re doing your homework. You’re putting in the hours and exercising your brainpower for the betterment of your small business and everyone who works for you. You have finally focused in on what is certainly the best way to go in this situation and you call everyone together so you can start to implement the change. Because you’re making an improvement you expect everyone to receive your new ideas with open arms, but that doesn’t happen. A few members of your team will be bold enough to point out what’s “wrong” with your solution, while some others will quietly grumble about the changes. You have a different problem now: Getting everyone on board with the changes that need to happen. In my example, the small business owner had great intentions – making things better for everyone. And the owner may have proceeded solo prompted by the desire not to bother anyone else with the problem. However, that route delayed acceptance. Compare that approach to a strategy that gets members of your team involved in researching the problem and possible solutions, and working to come up with an answer that is ideal for your small business. Here’s the trade off: If you take a top-down approach to developing and implementing changes, you may spend weeks in research and then years to get your changes fully accepted (if they are ever fully accepted). If you take a collaborative approach in these situations, it may take you longer to do the research, but you will probably get the changes implemented far more quickly and painlessly. And not only will your team buy into the solution better, their loyalty to your small business will increase through the process. It’s true that doing things “by committee” can slow down the initial part of the process, but the payoff you get after those first steps can far outweigh the initial slowness – and that’s really what matters in the long run. (Get more examples of how collaboration will benefit your small...
read moreHow startups and legacy companies can both cash in on trends
Health seems to be on almost everyone’s mind today and this was highlighted recently when New York City became the first city to require warning labels for salt. When there is any major trend, smart entrepreneurs and established business leaders alike look for opportunities and the current focus on health is not only serving to slim down American waistlines, it has the potential to fatten up profits for a wide variety of companies. Here’s a great example of this symbiotic relationship: Consumers look for more simple and healthy ways to eat. The Paleo Diet is born. Busy schedules make it difficult for Paleo Diet adherents to create many dishes that require a wide variety of Paleo-compliant ingredients and above average cooking skills; these include sweet snacks. Paleo Treats is founded and begins to market to this segment. The market is widespread, so Paleo Treats needs to ship products, and because the company sells food, the products need to arrive rather quickly. FedEx is a natural choice for a shipper. FedEx can benefit from the Paleo Diet movement if companies like Paleo Treats are successful. FedEx gives Paleo Treats a small business grant, hoping that it will become – if I can steal a line from “Casablanca” – “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” To sum this up, if the Paleo Diet works for consumers, Paleo Treats has a good shot at long-term success. If Paleo Treats does well, FedEx also profits. There are a few lessons here. The first is that smart entrepreneurs are always keeping an eye on trends and finding the pain points they create. In the world of diets and health, for example, it can be difficult for average consumers to easily get the kind of foods and ingredients they need. Americans are pretty famous for having a rather large sweet tooth, but creating sweets that adhere to the Paleo Diet guidelines, isn’t such an easy task, so there’s opportunity there. Stephen Charles Lincoln, who founded The Protein Bakery in New York back in 1999 recognized the same thing but was inspired by different diet and health trends. He saw that the personal fitness, personal trainer and gym-membership movement created demand for high-protein products and later moved into the gluten-free trend as well. The upside of marketing to these trends is that the playing field is, at first, relatively uncrowded. The downside is that many trends have a natural lifecycle and someday they start to wind down or at least level off. However, if there is a broader general category of your product or service – and the examples here have been healthy food items – you can pivot to some degree, as Lincoln has done by moving into the gluten-free area. But maybe the most important lesson among the companies I’ve mentioned so far is how FedEx nurtured Paleo Treats, recognizing that if Paleo Treats grows, it’s also a win for FedEx. If you don’t want to bet everything on a rising trend, find a way to work with someone who is! What service or product can you provide to startups that are looking to ride the next big wave to sweep through a consumer market? Even if you can’t offer grants like FedEx does, perhaps you can tweak your pricing or the ways you...
read moreHow to Find the Best Hashtags and Boost Your Social Media Engagement
Before we start talking about how to find the best hashtags, let’s do a little review of what exactly hashtags are – this is for those of you who aren’t exactly social media gurus; the rest of you can feel free to skip over. A hashtag is just a way of labelling and finding social media updates. It could apply to something that’s trending, like #Movember, or it could be specific to a certain campaign, like #CureBreastCancer. Basically, it’s a way of getting your message out. Hashtags started out on Twitter, but now they’re used across all social media. So, which ones are relevant to your niche, and which ones should you use? I’ve given advice on hashtag use and overuse elsewhere, today we’re mostly going to focus on the tags themselves. There are a number of online tools that you can use to find the best hashtags. Twitter is still one of the best resources for finding great hashtags, but don’t discount the usefulness of other tools. The following are three of the best – and they’re free! WhatTheTrend WhatTheTrend is a veritable wellspring of Twitter statistics and information. It’s owned by Hootsuite, which means that you can track hashtags as streams within Hootsuite. It lets you see trends globally, nationally, and even trends that are specific to your own city. You can track by the day, or by the month. The basic service is free, but if you want more options you can upgrade to paid service. Hashtags.org This venerable service got its start in 2007 as a freebie, and the basic tracking functions are still free – you can see what’s been trending over the previous 24 hours. However, if you want to store hashtags and monitor them over longer periods of time, you will have to upgrade to the paid service. Trendsmap To be realistic, Trendsmap isn’t the most exciting tool visually when it comes to helping you find the best hashtags, but it does allow you to see hashtags by city, country or continent on a world map. If your main focus is local, though, this is a very useful, very practical tool. Using Hashtags Effectively It’s not enough to just know how to use hashtags. You need to make sure that your hashtags are relevant to your subject matter. It’s also a good idea to base your hashtags on popular keywords. Google Keyword Planner is a great resource you can use. You also want to be careful how you structure your hashtags. After you create your hashtag, read it, read it again, and then say it out loud. Why? Because a bad hashtag can make you an object of embarrassment and ridicule…it’s happened to personalities as wonderful as singer Susan Boyle and companies as big as Research in Motion (RIM). Measure the competition I often head over to Twazzup to see how people are using a certain hashtag at any time of the day. You sign in with Twitter and then enter a hashtag or keyword. You get all the latest results scrolling down your screen, as well as how influencers are using the hashtag. This lets you see what kind of competition there will be to get eyeballs on your hastagged Tweet. Twazzup will also tell you about how many times that...
read moreLessons from a startup that wants to revolutionize learning piano
A lot of parents reading this have suffered through childhood piano lessons. They may have been required to take them when they were younger, and/or they may have made their children go through the ritual. I don’t want to give private piano lessons a bad rap here. I’ve played piano virtually all my life and performed Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu” when I was Miss Missouri. However, I know that many youngsters find piano lessons a chore and I also know that later in life many adults wish they had studied piano, or tried harder when they had lessons in their youth. One of the best things about technology today is that it can help us learn things that we missed earlier in life. Technology does this by making learning more convenient and less expensive. Sometimes it can also customize content delivery in ways that better suit our individual learning styles. In fact, I think one of the most exciting areas today is in learning technology, or e-learning. You can’t watch television without seeing a commercial for an online university, for example. One of the newest and best examples in this area is Skoove, an online and very tech-savvy piano teaching system. I think it can get more kids playing piano and also fulfill the dreams of many adults by providing them with a convenient way to learn fundamental piano skills. For the kids, working with a computer and Internet connection is probably more in line with how they prefer to spend their time. For adults, being able to learn piano in the privacy of their homes and whenever they have the time are major selling points. “61 percent of the people in the US, UK, Australia, and Germany would like to learn a musical instrument, but currently only a fraction actually do. With Skoove, we hope to make that dream a reality for anyone with access to a computer and a desire to learn,” says Dr. Florian Plenge, Skoove cofounder and CEO. I’ve checked out the technology and it works well. You need an electronic keyboard and it must have either a USB or MIDI interface so it can be connected to the computer you’ll be using. Setup was simple for my MIDI and I ran through a few of the introductory lessons. (A version that works with an acoustic piano is in development.) You get your instructions from the computer screen. It illustrates what you have to do and then you basically follow along. The software is able to measure how you’re doing so it can help you pace your progress. “We have designed Skoove to combine the best elements of a live tutor – giving real time feedback and adapting to the student – with all the convenience of the web, being available anywhere 24/7, and at a fraction of the price,” Dr. Plenge explains. In fact, you can take the teaching system on a pretty decent test drive without having to pay anything or even input your credit card – which is something I really appreciate in online commerce. Skoove has a good deal of backing. It came out of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator and recently completed a seed funding round with the largest German early stage fund, the High Tech Gründerfonds. I mention this because teaching/learning/information-sharing is...
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