My exploration of social media
Posts tagged Social Media
What Men Hate About Facebook
Jul 25th
This is a great short clip I came acrross that Mike Bracco shared on Friend Feed. It highlights some of the differences men and women have when using Facebook…. and it made me laugh. Good stuff – so check it out.
Social Media’s Contribution to Customer Service – “United Breaks Guitars”
Jul 17th
United Breaks Guitars is a great example of what social media can do for customer service. David Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, illustrate with this song and video just what can be done when social media is used to express grievances. Today when I first saw this video – having seen it posted by a friend of mine, Jason Crawford, on Facebook, already had over 3 million views and over 15 thousand comments. News channels and web pages are reporting on in today all over the place so I expect the number to just increase. United has already responded to David about the incident and has tried to make amends… the damage is done though and perhaps they will make some changes due to the incident. (Click here for more information from David)
My point in posting this though is to highlight the change that is happening in business due to social media. Social media makes it so any one’s voice can be heard by millions. You do not have to be famous or clever, or even a good song writer like Carroll. All you need is just a little on line presence to make your voice heard through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or whatever and you can make an impact. For business this means they can no longer sluff you off and ignore treating you right. Customer service is key in this world today thanks to social media; some like Zappos.com get it, others like United do not. It also means that business need to understand this change in dynamic or they could get burned… Just like United.
Why Your Business Needs to Twitter
May 27th
Twitter has been around now for a few years – early on the numbers were small. Now twitter is starting to be widely adopted – more and more people are hopping on. Your business needs to be there, and here’s why:
People are looking for you. More and more of the people you are trying to reach with your business are on twitter and looking for people, products and groups in areas they are interested in. If you’re not there, you’ll miss the opportunity.
Bring traffic to your Site. Twitter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. In your tweets you can post links to news, articles, promotions or whatever on your site and automatically drive traffic to that page on your site. This is extremely valuable whether you have just a blog or a large corporate site. The more followers you have the more you will have come, and within seconds of your tweet.
Keep your customers informed. Once you have your targeted following, twitter can help you to keep your customers informed on upcoming events, products, changes or company news. If you have a blog, you can link twitter to your blog to send out a tweet each time there is a new post – once it goes out you immediately get readers, just make sure that title is catchy enough.
Put a face to the company name. More and more value is being seen by having a company with a human face behind it. What better way to humanize your company than to have tweets from the owner available for both employees and customers to follow. Followers can respond to what you are doing and build a connection with you that may not have existed otherwise, thus building brand loyalty and happy customers and employees.
Respond real-time to news. Twitter can also give you the ability to respond quickly to news about your Business – good or bad. If it is good news, you can hop on twitter to spread the joy with everyone. If it is bad or false, you can respond quickly and get your side of the story out, or correct misinformation.
Find new opportunities. Twitter is also a great way to connect with other business and people. Each person or business is sharing ideas and experiences that they are having. It can give you a better idea of where you can provide new services or products that your public are demanding. Watching their tweets can also give you ideas on where you can improve upon current services and products.
As you get out there, and start tweeting, you will surly see some benefits I have not listed, these are just a few.
Some additional things I don’t mention here but will be writing on in the future are: how best to start using Twitter for a business, how to grow your followers the right way, and Twitter best practices.
Seesmic Desktop – Nice Facebook and Twitter Integration
May 25th
The last few days the new Seesmic Desktop application has been getting a lot of attention. When I first saw it late Friday night I installed it after seeing that you can maintain more than one twitter account with it. I have been using Tweet Deck for my Twitter and Facebook streams but with just one of the two twitter accounts I have (I have one for myself personally and one for the Family Nester Blog). If you could integrate two accounts on Tweet Deck I had not found it. After the install of Seesmic Desktop I was quickly impressed by what it could do and liked the interface a lot more than Tweet Deck. As a note, it states on it’s main page that it works for Mac and PC. I use Ubuntu, a Linux operating system, but Seesmic Desktop is an Adobe AIR program – I have Adobe AIR and it runs great so I figured I would try out Seesmic… and it works great. Check out this video on it:
Social Media is Changing the World
May 23rd
The more and more I am learning about social media, the more I am realizing that now is the perfect time for all of this to come to a head. Every time that there is a recession or depression in the economy there has been a great change in who has the money. With the current recession business are struggling to come out on top of all the job losses, decreases in orders and bankruptcies. At the same time people are becoming more and more informed and the world is becoming more and more connected. More countries are also joining in and the days of national economies are going away and being replaced by a world economy. Now is the time for companies, old and new to embrace social media.
I feel as the social media trend continues with the development of web 2.0 software we will see a decrease in regular TV watching as more and more turn to the web for films, sports, news and sitcoms. Traditional phone lines will disappear and be replaced by live video streaming and cell phones. People will buy more and more on-line and through on-line media sharing. Technology will begin to jump drastically as more and more knowledge sharing of statistics and innovation are opened and collaboration is made across places where there once were boundaries. Social media encourages synergy. Ideas I get are stimulated by others thoughts. It is truly changing the world and I want to be a part of it.