“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust
You can follow everything that I suggest you in my book. You could spend hours and hours every week updating your Twitter page, sending out email newsletters, making your Facebook Page the most spectacular one on the net – but if you don’t know what the return on that investment is, then you might as well have done nothing at all.
You need a plan and you need to keep five very important things in mind while you are doing it – my five rules of social media marketing: Listen, Integrate, Engage, Promote and Measure.
Listen
If you were having a conversation in real life and someone just busted in and started banging on about their own interests and what they did for a living you wouldn’t be too impressed. It is no different with a conversation happening via social networking.
Actually in the long run listening in the initial stage of social networking is also going to save you a lot of time and effort as well.
If you own a steakhouse, there is probably little gain for you in interacting with someone who is well known as a vegetarian (this isn’t always true of course – even vegetarians have friends!). You have to first listen to people, see what social networks and conversations they engage in and who with, and also try to gauge their level of social activity – do they have thousands of followers, are they saying insightful things, are they a generally positive person for you to interact, and be aligned with?
As well as listening to individuals, listen to the wider online community as well. Is your product or service being talked about, and if so, is the conversation positive or negative? Which social networking platforms discuss your type of business the most and who are the movers and shakers in that community?
Search platforms like Facebook and Twitter for your own name and business if that’s appropriate as well as your market, the competition, and relevant keywords to your business and market, as well as potential customers.
Social networking platforms are already set up to help you do this. Twitter Search, for example, makes this kid of market research very easy. Let’s say you run a fast-food restaurant. Chances are the bigger players in your market are being spoken about – both good and bad – all the time in social media platforms.
By listening to this chatter, you can get a better idea of how the social media participants view the big names and their service, as well as the type of things that these people would rather those big names did better. This is fundamental focus group marketing but without the huge costs.
The best thing about this kind of search facility is that you can customise it to search for chatter only from your local area of about your own service.
There is a great example of this in a Domino’s Pizza franchisee in Chicago, USA, who has become the master of monitoring social media mentions of his product in his local area.
Ramon de Leon owns several Domino’s Pizza restaurants in the Chicago area. He discovered back in 2005, that in social networking platforms, he had a new line of communication directly to his target audience and with virtually no advertising cost to his franchises.
Ramon uses both Facebook and Twitter to boost his businesses’ profile as well as doing something that would have been considered crazy in the past: openly apologising when he or his staff get it wrong.
Ramon watches platforms like Twitter closely through their search facilities and when he sees that somebody has been unhappy with the service from one of his restaurants and mentions their unhappiness on one of their social media sites, he immediately and quite openly apologises for the mistake and also offers a big discount or free pizzas to the unhappy customer. And he does all of this in clear view and very much out in the open on Twitter and Facebook.
Armed with a smart phone that has a decent video camera in it, Ramon records a quick video apology mentioning the unhappy customer and complete details of their complaint and what he is going to do to make it right. He then uploads this video not only to his website but also his social media channels and as a direct message to the complainant. You can see an example of this here.
This kind of customer service, in both its immediacy and directness, is something conventional marketing and customer service could never achieve. It’s not really the same as a tiny apology printed in the local newspaper two weeks later is it?
One thing I suggest you don’t do when monitoring this chatter is jump in every time there is something negative said about your competition and try to grab that business for yourself.
For instance, I track what is being said about the big players in retail travel, companies like Flight Centre, QANTAS and CoverMore Insurance and so on, as research for my travel business, Nick Bowditch Travel.
Sometimes social media participants might express why they are unhappy with something that one of these companies has done to them. It is tempting to reply directly to that person and agree that said company is totally rubbish and next time they should book their travel with me!
But it looks really bad.
In fact, it looks like something that the bigger players in each market might do. As a small business owner with integrity and professionalism, I hope that nobody does their marketing this way.
Instead, I might say to them that I understand their frustration and ask if there is anything I can do to try and fix the situation with the company they are unhappy with.
By offering to be a go-between for the unhappy customer you can achieve two things: the bigger company will respect you for not trying to poach their customer as well as trying to help their own business, and the unhappy customer will remember what you have done for them next time they want the same service.
There is no better way to get to know your customer than to first listen to them, and no quicker way to alienate them than NOT listening to them. Social media marketing makes this interaction with your market so much easier, but despite this ease, it is still something that most of us are very poor at.
Check out upcoming posts for the next 4 rules of social media marketing and please let me know in the comments below if you agree or disagree with how I think small businesses should be doing their marketing online.
If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through any of these means, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.
This article appears in full in my book, The Business of Being David – How to use social media to make your small business big. To read the sample chapters and to purchase your own copy, click here.
