I was listening to a very good Beancast episode last night discussing whether or not companies should follow back on Twitter. The guests raised some good points about why people follow brands, primarily for coupons and product information–not engagement. The guests also suggested that companies can monitor their brand an engage when needed through Twitter sear h or Tweetdeck. And, that interation may be more likely to come from a brand evangelist or community manager than the corporate Twitter account.
All I could think while listening to these arguments was — who cares? What is so hard about following back? No one is suggesting a brand read all the tweets of those they are following. In fact, do you know any individuals who are? Just follow back. If someone cared enough to follow your brand, the least you can do is follow back (note: I am not saying this applies to individuals, just corporate accounts.) I find it a huge turnoff to go to a brands’ page and see they are only following a handful of people.
Think of it this way, following back is like having a mini-focus group constantly going on. If you want insight into what is interesting, important, and exciting to your fans, just tune into the stream for a while. You may learn more than you think.
Finding misspellings on signs is a pet peeve of mine. Granted, in today’s world of texts, tweets, blogs and emails, I’m as guilty as the next person of making grammatical and spelling errors. But on signs? Come on now. These have to be proofed by many people.
So the other day, I’m sitting and having lunch outside at the California Pizza Kitchen at the Natick Mall when I gaze over at the sign on the side of the building. I’m glancing through the list of stores when one catches my eye — Athropologie. Hmm. There is a really cool store I like to go to but I always thought it was Anthropologie. It made me question myself…is it really Athropologie? So I took a picture and put it out on Twitter then looked it up on my iPhone. No, I was right, it is Anthropologie, with a “n.”
I was hoping they’d be a social savvy brand and monitor Twitter for their name and possibly respond. They do have a Twitter account, although they are following only 86 people and it is clearly a broadcast channel. But, since I didn’t hear from them, I tried to be a considerate citizen and took the trouble to go to their website and submit a contact form with the picture letting them know about the mistake. I got a fairly standard email back thanking me for contacting them, stating that they would alert the local store, and providing me with customer service contact info should I have any questions.
I was pretty underwhelmed. Here you are, embarrassing yourself with this blatant misspelling of your store name — ok, maybe it was the mall’s fault but seriously, no one noticed this? I go out of my way to help out and I get a lame thank you? There is such a gap between brands actively monitoring the social streams and engaged with their community and those that aren’t. I mentioned this to my husband and the first thing he said was, “are they sending you a gift certificate?”
I don’t need a gift certificate but here is how I think it should have been handled:
Anthropologie community manager/brand evangelist sees my tweet and shows apparent dismay, then eat some humble pie, admit everyone makes mistakes, and let the community know they are fixing it. Something like “Oops, thanks @tgruber for finding our name misspelled <blush>, getting it fixed now. Glad we have friends like you helping out.”
Customer service account reps trained on corporate social media policies and culture so that when receiving an email/form like mine, they could respond in the same authentic, human tone.
Possibly send a discount coupon as a thank you and gain a lot of good will.
That type of response would have generated a different blog post. So if you haven’t heard it yet, can you please make sure you have a community manager, you engage, you respond, you are authentic and human, and you act like you care as much about your customers as you want them to care about you.
Update: I received an email about 12 hours after this posted from Anthropologie’s Community Manager:
Tamara,
Thank you very much for tweeting to us about the misspelling of our brand name at the Natick Mall. Unfortunately we did not see your original tweet, but greatly appreciate you bringing it to our attention. We are contacting the mall to correct the error.
If I can ever be of assistance to you in the future, please let me know.
Best regards,
Kelly
Anthropologie Community Manager
I’m glad to see that they are monitoring blogs and responded in a sincere way. Remember to make sure your Community Manager and Customer Service departments are in synch to communicate in the same voice.
I was reading Om Malik’s post today on the increase in start-up action in the Valley and it got me thinking…when is the right time to start a start-up? About 12 years ago I had a great idea. Create a website where people register their holiday wish list (remember those letters to Santa) and share it with family or friends that ask the inevitable…what do you want for your birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah,question. The site would then link to various e-commerce sites where they could buy online. Remember, these were the days of the Pets.com sock puppet and when Amazon just sold books. I was really excited about this idea because I hadn’t seen it anywhere yet. But, I wasn’t in a place to do much about it. I think the most I did was write an email to Yahoo! (remember when they were the leader?) with the idea and a pitch to hire me to lead it. Of course that didn’t get anywhere and lo and behold, a few months later the Amazon Wish List debuted, along with their expansion way, way, way beyond books.
Since that time, I’ve never stopped thinking of ideas and wondering what I should do with them. Rob Walling and Mike Taber from the Start ups for the Rest of Us podcast give us some stupid reasons to start a software company. But when do you just dive in?
I have two ideas right now that I’d love to move on. The first wouldn’t require a ton of upfront capital — just a good web designer, freelancer curators/writers, marketing (I can handle that), and eventually some sponsorship sales (or bus dev with ad networks). BUT, it would be pretty easy for a portal to wrap into its portfolio. Is that a good thing or a bad? Software companies hope to have enough IP and momentum to encourage an acquisition. This model would be either easily replicated or I’d have to compete with a much bigger player.
The second idea involves a physical product plus a social community. The community aspect is fairly simple but the physical product is not anything I’ve worked with before. It would require product design, manufacturing, and sales to specialty retailers. However, I think it is defensible and has a real market with revenues not based on chasing ad dollars.
So which do you do? Do you seek out the capital and make a life changing investment in pursuing option #2 or do you keep your day job and start up option #1 and see how it goes? This is what I’ll be thinking about this weekend. I’d love to hear from entrepreneurs what made you finally dive in head first and turn your idea into a start-up.
I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts at the gym, in the car, and while doing busy work. Podcasts are a great resource to keep on top of the news; stay current on new technologies, applications, and business best practices; and, of course, be entertained.
Here are my favorite podcasts for marketers:
1. Marketing Over Coffee: Hosted by John Wall and Christopher Penn, this podcast is jam packed with tips and tricks regarding SEO/SEM, email marketing, inbound marketing, and social media. It helps to be a bit techy but this is a must listen for marketers.
2. For Immediate Release: Hosted by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson, this podcast covers all the hot topics in PR including best practices, PR-related market research, social media, and discussions and analysis of PR missteps. The discussion between the hosts, segments from contributors, and listener comments all keep the content fresh and interesting.
3. Six Pixels of Separation: Hosted by Mitch Joel, Six Pixels covers marketing, social media, and interviews with authors and industry luminaries. I particularly enjoy Mitch’s Media Hacks podcast, which is a frank discussion between some really smart and fun guys in social media including: Christopher Penn, Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, and Hugh McGuire. The Jaffe & Joel series also has some interesting and sometimes controversial conversations between Mitch and Joseph Jaffe from Powered.
4. Small Business Marketing Blog: Hosted by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, this podcast is a series of interviews with authors, entrepreneurs, and small business marketing experts. They offer great food-for-thought on building and marketing your business that can apply not just to small, local businesses, but start ups and tech companies as well.
5. The BeanCast: Hosted by Bob Knorpp, this podcast gathers together a panel of interesting people in the marketing, advertising, PR, and social media space to cover hot topics in the marketing space.
Some of the other podcasts that are on my weekly listening list are:
1. This Week in Google & This Week in Tech (TWiG & TWiT): If you don’t have time to read all the tech blogs, these podcasts offer good summary & discussion on the hot topics. Expect an inordinate amount of coverage of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
2. Books on the Nightstand: Hosted by Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness, both who work in the book publishing industry but produce the podcast as a personal project. I’ve gotten a ton of great book recommendations and expanded my horizons in terms of the types of books I would typically read.
3. Manic Mommies: Hosted by Erin Kane and Kristin Brandt, this is my very favorite podcast and makes me realize I am not alone in trying to balance a career and family. These ladies are funny, honest, smart, and so fun to listen to. While part bitch session (my fav part), they also interview people and companies of interest to working moms.
4. Cooking with the Moms: From Meal Makeover Moms Liz Weiss and Janice Bissex, this podcast offer nutrition discussion and recipes that are family friendly, healthy, and taste good. This podcast has given me plenty of ideas on meals to make for my family.
5. IM-Mobile: Hosted by Brian Prows, this podcast features interview from mobile industry executives and is a great way to stay on top of emerging companies in different sectors of the mobile industry.
I’m trying very hard to get to the gym more so I’m (hopefully) going to need even more podcasts to listen to. So what are your favorites? Any suggestions on marketing, business, tech, mobile or parenting podcasts?
I’m lucky, I recently got back from a fabulous 11 days in Hawaii. While we didn’t turn on the TV once and tried to only check email a few times a day (6 hour time difference from the East Coast helped out a bit), technology still played a role in our vacation. Since you’ve probably already planned your vacation using sites and apps like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, Hotels.com, and others, I’m going to focus this blog post on technology to use while on the road.
1. The iPad
I have to put this first because it is our be-all and end-all device for media consumption and entertainment. The long battery life was put to the test with our 11 hour flight from Newark to Honolulu. Before leaving I downloaded TV shows (thanks Disney for those free 1st episodes!), rented movies, purchased books (for the family on both iBooks and Kindle), and loaded up the games. All of which were readily consumed, taking turns of course, by the whole family on the plane. Once on the ground, it served primarily as a gaming, reading (although not in the sun), and web browsing device. We did stream one show from Netflix as our only “TV” on the Islands. We have the WiFi version so the iPad mostly stayed in the room and safe, but we did bring the Sprint Overdrive MiFi device to create a wireless hotspot when we needed coverage. On the go, I mostly used the apps on my iPhone.
2. Trip Journal
Lava as seen from the Helicopter
One thing I forgot to buy before leaving is a travel journal to record our memories and favorite places. This is something I like to do so that later I can recommend restaurants and remember those special moments that can’t be captured just in photos. Luckily, they have an app for that. I downloaded Trip Journal for the iPhone. The cool thing about this app is that you can set waypoints via GPS and add notes and photos (taken from the iPhone camera). Sometimes I got caught up in the moment (imagine that!) and forgot to record a stop but for the most part, I was able to capture our stops and create a journal entry to record our thoughts and impressions. When I got back, I have a few options to export this information. Pros of this app: ability to record trip on the go, utilizes GPS to create trip stops. Cons: doesn’t sync between devices (iPad/iPhone), export to Facebook didn’t work for me, export to Google Earth is cool but you have to be a little techy to really get value out of it, wish GPS brought up locations to choose from (a la Foursquare vs entering names each time), wish you could export to a text file or create something printable.
Rainbow over Sheraton Maui
3. Google Maps
With two smartphones in the car, plus a pretty good map reader (hooray for those years working at AAA), we didn’t bother with a GPS in our rental cars. While the GPS turn-by-turn voice directions on my husband’s Sprint Palm Pre is definitely superior, it was also very unreliable. Google Maps, while slow, is extremely helpful in finding out where you are and how to get from point A to point B via car, foot, or mass transit. I used to get very frustrated trying to get directions to a location from where I was (Google not being known for the best User Interface), but then I discovered that instead of dropping pins or trying to figure out the address where I was, I could just start typing Current Location and there you go.
4. Foursquare
This may not provide a lot of value to travelers but it is fun to let your friends back home know where you are. The post to Twitter and Facebook capabilities make this simpler. Plus you never know who might be nearby or what specials you’ll discover. And all those check ins did earn me a few more badges.
5. Hear Planet
If you are going somewhere near major tourist attractions, check out the Hear Planet app (iPhone). It provides audio guided tours to major attractions around the globe.
6. Destination Apps
Make sure you do searches for applications specific to your destination. I was able to find apps for Volcano National Park, Driving Maui, Aloha Hawaii and many more. Chances are wherever you are going, there is an app for that. There are countless paid and free apps for Disney, National Parks, City Guides, and so much more.
7. Local Apps
You never know what you are going to need until you need it. How about a 24 hour pharmacy, ATM, hospital, gas, dry cleaner… There are many apps out there that answer this call. Check out Where, Around Me, Vicinity, and others. Of course, tapping your Twitter or other social network is also a great way to find out the true local hotspots.
8. KodakGallery.com
When you come back home with all those fabulous vacation photos, what do you do with them? Some use Flickr (and thanks because that was a great way to research what hotels really look like), but I prefer KodakGallery.com. I’ve been using it for years to share photos privately with my family and friends that live far away. Because of this, my entire library of digital photos is backed up there and every couple of years, I purchase an archive disc just in case. Other family members use KodakGallery also, allowing me to purchase copies of their photos or use them to create family photo albums. After a special trip, I like to create a photo book of pictures just from that trip. I am able to choose the cover, page background, choose different layouts per page, write captions, and easily edit and preview. These have become treasured family keepsakes and for those of us that don’t scrapbook, an easy way to record special memories.
What technology devices & applications have you used on your summer vacation?
For the past few years, I’ve made it a point to check out all the latest social applications so that I can understand which are being used, by whom, and how. This helps me stay current and advise clients on how to work these tools into their marketing strategy. Some of these become essential (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, Tungle.me) some are fun (Foursquare, Plancast, Goodreads, YouTube) and some just don’t stick for me for one reason or another (Digg, TripIt, Stumble Upon, Gather, Flickr.). Of all of these, the one that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is Delicious.
In case you don’t know, Delicious, which is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks (thanks Wikipedia.)
Here are just a few of the way you can use Delicious:
Share industry news within your company: reading all the industry blogs and newsletters can be time consuming. Try assigning one person to scan all the industry news and tag all “must-reads” for the rest of the company. They can either subscribe to the RSS feed in their reader or email, or, pull the RSS feed into the company Wiki or Intranet home page.
Track all mentions of you or your company in the press: Maintaining an “in the news” page on your website can be labor intensive. How about tagging all articles as “press” and pulling an RSS feed of that tag into your website News page or Facebook tab.
Keep market research at your fingertips: Everyday you see new research and articles with stats relevant to your business but they can be so hard to find when you need it. I tag all research articles as “stats” and add other qualifiers like “market share” or the source of the research like “Comscore.” Then when inevitably that salesperson comes asking for data, it is even easier to find then a Google search.
Monitor competitors: You probably already have Google alerts set up for your competitors (or you should), but what do you do when you need information after the fact? How about tagging articles with competitor and something descriptive like revenue, sales, customers, staff, etc. You might want to do this on a private account unless you want to alert your competitors that your are keeping tabs (or tags) on them. I’d recommend not using their name, but maybe an initial or codeword, after all, why give them the visibility for someone searching Delicious for their name?
SEO: speaking of search, don’t forget to Tag your own blog posts and valuable content. Be sure to use keywords and your company/brand name.
After spending three years on Twitter, sometimes I can still be surprised by clients and prospects that still struggle to understand how to use Twitter for their business. Then I remember that I’m living in the fishbowl. While what I do goes way beyond helping a client get onto Twitter, I put together the following tutorial to help clients learn the basics. This includes answering questions like what is a RT? What about a hashtag? How do I find people to follow? How do I get people to follow me? What are the best tools to use? Hopefully it even provides some food for thought on the bigger question — how to figure out what you should be doing on Twitter.
When your communication needs expand to more than just blogging to your subscribers or clients, it may become pertinent to create a screencast. Finding myself in that exact position, it was time to explore the options to uncover the best screencasting service. If you happen to also find yourself in need of a screencasting service in the near future, I’ve shared my findings on some of the most popular services and broken them out by key attributes here:
After review, I’ve decided to try GoView for my first screencast project. It provides me with all of the necessary features with an ease of use that is certainly appreciated, with no strict time limits. I also had the opportunity to attend a webinar that was created using GoView and the quality and look of the screencast was impressive. Should screencasting become a significant tool for me in the future creating a need for more advanced features, I may consider using the JingPro service and dishing out the $14.95 annual fee.
Stay tuned for part 2 to see if GoView was the right choice and the overall experience of creating the first screencast. I would also love to hear about your own opinions of the screencast services mentioned here or any others you have found to be valuable.
You may have noticed the widget that I have at the end of each blog post that allows you to rate the blog content and provides recommendations for other blogs and articles on that topic. It is offered from a company called Outbrain and does a good job providing author feedback, relevant links to readers, and promoting traffic to your blog.
How does it work?
First you install the Outbrain widget on your blog. They offer a variety of options and support for WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, TypePad and Javascript. Once you set up an account, claim your blog, and manage your settings, you are good to go. You can choose whether to have recommendations just from your blog or from others as well. If you choose to accept sponsored recommendations, you can even make some money off of it (or donate it to charity, that is what I do!)
If you have a really great post that you want to attract more attention to, the Outloud service will include your link in relevant recommendations across their publisher network (including Venturebeat, Slate, Tribune, USA Today, Discovery, and others.) It costs $10 per link per month and you receive full reporting on the number of impressions and clicks. I’ve used this for a client and it has shown up in the Top 5 referring sites in driving traffic.
This is a great, inexpensive way to provide some value to readers and generate some more traffic. What are your thoughts? Have you used Outbrain or Outloud? Anything similar? Check it out below and let me know what you think.
One advantage of living in a smaller city is that you don’t need to wake up at 5 am to get your hands on an iPad. In fact, stopping by Providence Place around 3pm on Saturday still scored our family the iPad we’ve been waiting for. Even after all the media attention that has been paid to the launch of the iPad, many still remain skeptical on whether or not Apple’s iPad will be revolutionary or a ho-hum. All I can say is that for me, I knew as soon as I saw the launch event that I wanted one. Why? I see this device as a bridge technology between my iPhone and laptop and here is how I plan on using it.
Business Travel
When I’m travelling to business meetings or conferences, I tend to use my laptop and iPhone to view content rather than create it. Generally I use email, browsing, travel apps, Tweetdeck, and possibly some entertainment (iBooks/Videos) for when my brain is too fried to keep working. Instead of letting my eyes blur spending hours hunched over my iPhone, I look forward to taking my iPad on my next trip. The instant on is a huge plus for plane and train travel where I lose so much time waiting for my laptop to boot and it will handle all my basic content consumption needs.
Personal Travel
We are planning a family trip to Hawaii this year and the iPad was a must have for the long flight — knocking the battery life of the iPhone, laptop and Leapster out of the park. It will also save space in our luggage by leaving the game cartridges, books, laptop, and DVDs at home. I can’t wait to use the eReader, load it up with some movies to kill time on the flight, keep all my daughter’s favorite apps from my iPhone and load up some new ones. Then, once I’m there, I may be compelled to check email and check on my social networks from time to time. And yes, I can do all this on my iPhone but we know the battery is crap and writing longer emails is painful.
Household Appliance
I’ve long envisioned an instant-on device that would sit on our kitchen island and allow me to check weather, view recipes, catch up on news, and sneak in a little work while I’m “cooking” without getting called on the carpet about it. I even installed an outlet into the kitchen island in anticipation — even if I did claim it was for my Cuisinart.
So did you get a iPad? What will you use it for? I’d love to hear. And, if you haven’t seen last week’s Modern Family, you need to watch it…
