Monthly Archives

October 2010

Six Ways to Change the Conversation Using Social Media

By Social Media

As part of the social media presentation I gave to a nonprofit organization recently, I said: “prepare for the negative.”

It’s a good line; it gets attention and more importantly it encourages thought and preparation before engaging in social media. Whether you’re a small company, a large for-profit entity, a nonprofit or an individual practitioner you need to prepare for the negative and decide what you’re going to do about it when it happens.

Where there’s something to criticize, there will be a critic. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have critics; valid feedback and constructive criticism can help you make your service and your business better. As an example, see how Domino’s Pizza has used customer feedback in a constructive way to improve their business.


“You can either use negative comments to get you down or you can use them to excite you and energize your process.” — Patrick Doyle, President, Domino’s Pizza.

Here are six ways you can take back lost business by changing the conversation:

1. Listen and respond. Learn what’s being said about your business by using social media monitoring tools, customer surveys, secret shops and focus groups. Find out what the negative is so you can develop a plan to address it.

2. Allow visibility. It’s a huge leap from where we were as a culture in using public relations and the dreaded “spin” to allowing the public to see your downfalls, your weaknesses and mistakes. It is critical to the current culture of customer service that you allow comments on your blog, that you allow customers to interact with you in the places they are online (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

3. Reward feedback by thanking those who provide it and include them in the conversation of how you can make your service or your products better.

4. Respond to everything – let the public know you’re listening — we often find that people are more polite when they know you’re in the room.

5. Be accessible. Make sure you’re actually available on the social networks you’ve set up — if you have a Twitter account, you must be managing it.  Provide your phone number and answer the phone! Provide an e-mail address or a contact form and make sure you’re following up.

6. Share the story of how you took a negative conversation and turned it around. Did you get a bad score on a customer service survey? What did you do to improve? Share the differences with your audiences and they will respect you for making the honest effort.

Moderating Blog Comments: The Discussion on Spin Sucks

By Communications

Oddly enough, I’m only posting this to drive you to another blog post on another site. I really want you to read this post: Moderating Blog Comments on Spin Sucks, the fight against destructive spin. Pay attention to the conversation unfolding in the comments themselves. It is a discussion worth your time and consideration.

The handling of blog comments – to moderate, to not moderate and all that resides between the two – has long been discussed. Many of us have different opinions on the topic. Personally, I don’t moderate, meaning, I don’t approve or delete comments before they appear — they are automatically published and if the comment is in violation of my comment policy, then I will remove it later. I’ve only had to do this once in about seven years of blogging so for me, it works.

I’m interested in this conversation though, and how Livefyre, the tool helping the conversation happen, will change the way we interact using comments on blogs.

Join the conversation — what do you think about moderating blog comments?

Social Media Tour of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport

By Social Media

The Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport has built an excellent community of engaged passengers and customers in Central Virginia. With hundreds of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, the Airport wanted to offer a special opportunity to bring the community together, on-site at the Airport.

Using Twitter and Facebook to reach out to people in the community who are already interested members of the Airport’s audience, the Airport offered a special, behind-the-scenes runway tour of the Airport on a beautiful fall day.

The event was an opportunity for an online community to come together in real life (as they say) and participate in a shared experience. The Airport’s executive director Barbara Hutchinson was able to connect with customers and future customers of the Airport on a personal level, continuing to develop relationships on behalf of the Airport and making herself available to answer any questions the community had about the runway extension project or Airport operations.

If you’d like to know about future events at CHO, you can follow the Airport on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/CHOAirport or become a fan of the Airport by clicking “Like” on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CHOAirport

Special thanks to Steinar Knutsen for the fantastic video of the day’s tour.

Today Show Fuels Fears with Facebook Story

By Social Media

Generally speaking, I like the Today Show. I grew up with morning news programs and when I get a chance to watch them, I enjoy getting a news update with a sprinkling of magazine-style programming.

I was, however, deeply disappointed in the Today Show for the following piece about Facebook safety. Watch the clip below.

What this story does is fuel fear. It’s intentionally alarming people with a report of a perceived safety risk that is just not valid.

In the story, the victim was robbed by a neighbor who, the report alleges, knew she was leaving because of her Facebook status, and the fact that she was friends with her creepy neighbor on Facebook.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my neighbors know when I’m leaving because they see me put a suitcase in my car and drive away. We’re neighbors for goodness sakes. That being said, it was likely a neighbor who stole my kayak earlier this year. That theft itself had nothing to do with social media and everything to do with me having a thief for a neighbor.

The alarm over Facebook places, FourSquare and other status updates letting people know you’re not at your house is really overblown. It is, I’m told, the same kind of concern people had back when the answering machine was invented. People were fearful that if their answering machine said they were out and to please leave a message, they would be a target for thieves.

We’re all targets for thieves!

Let’s face it, if someone wants to commit a crime and they’ve picked you as their victim, short of locking yourself up at home, being paranoid and guarded with every single interaction, you’re likely going to get hit. Is this how you want to live your life? Nope. Neither do I.

Now, since the woman in the Today Show piece had her creepy neighbor as a friend and was posting her travel plans on Facebook, one thing she could have done is be more mindful about who she friends on Facebook, and what level of information those friends get to see. See my post about lists and how to create them in five easy steps. If she had a list called People I Don’t Really Know or Trust then she could have added creepy neighbor to that list and elected not to share her travel plans with people on that list. It’s not a bad idea, but truly, not worth getting all freaked out over.

What do you think? Was the Today Show playing on people’s fears over engaging online?

How to Create Lists, Save Some Privacy in Facebook, in Five Easy Steps

By Social Media

I just finished speaking to a group of nonprofit leaders at a workshop. There was a point in the discussion when one of the participants became very hung up in how one makes lists and decides who sees what in your Facebook profile. I’m endeavoring to address that here, in five easy steps.

1. Log on to Facebook and look for the word “Account” in the upper lefthand corner.

Account

2. Click on Account and choose Edit Friends from the drop down menu to get to the following screen:

Jennifers

Just LOOK at all those lovely Jennifers!

4. Now that I’ve created my list of Jennifers, I can decide if each Jennifer should belong to other lists as well, for example, this Jennifer is also a friend and someone who is part of my network in St. Louis, so she should belong to both of these lists as well.

privacy

See? Privacy in Five Steps. Easy.