Your customers are tweeting about you. Are you ready?

It’s no secret that social media has changed the landscape. Consumers have a direct line to businesses in a way they never had before. Social media platforms are providing a public place for people to connect, share ideas, link to fun and thought-provoking stories and visuals. They are also sharing their customer experiences, good and bad, on all platforms, but with the most immediacy on Twitter. If you’re not already monitoring your brand on Twitter, you are missing out on a great opportunity to connect and engage with your customers.

Building your brand on Twitter starts with being real

Consumers expect to interact with brands on social media. In order to develop loyalty, it is imperative to create a personality for your brand that is human, credible, likeable, and approachable. It needs to be real, and it needs to be felt consistently across every touch-point.

Knowing that your customers are sharing their opinions about your product on Twitter, how can you be proactive? What is your relationship like with your customer? What are you doing to engage with your customers to encourage them to tweet positively about your brand?

Brands that do well on social media are those that build strategies that will get them noticed and remembered. Not every customer experience is going to be great, but finding ways to use Twitter and Facebook creatively will make you memorable.

Some brands have it right. My friend Karl (@TheKarltopia) hates being on the road, but since his work requires it he reasons that he may as well enjoy it, so he drives a Mercedes.  Karl is known for his positive attitude and when he loves something, he tweets about it. He sent some positive vibes toward Mercedes Benz recently and they responded promptly with a personal message and a custom banner, designed just for him. You can bet Karl told all his friends about it.

 

How are you reaching your customers through social media? What are they saying about you?

Today is my birthday

It's my birthday today. Today's the day to pick one goal, write it down and then commit to do whatever it takes to make my dreams come true. 


Lots of people have bucket lists of dreams that never come true. Or maybe they do, but my sense is that most people are like me. Lots of great ideas, but only so much energy and wherewithal.


I spoke with a personal coach recently, who asked, "What are your dreams?" Good question; obviously a good way for her to get a sense of who I am and what I want from life. I knew I had dreams ... somewhere ... but I have been too busy fighting with life to pay attention to them. I groped for an answer. "I want to write a book," I said. I wrote one in college, back in the days when they gave you credits for making yogurt. I convinced my English prof that I could write a novel, and I did. The first draft of a very embarrassing attempt in the 'sword and sorcery' genre about a man who found a sword that drank souls. (A vampire sword. Hmm. Maybe I should resurrect that).


I remember that it was a lot of fun, typing away on my mother's IBM Selectric. It had no correcting function and I was a rotten typist so I quickly ran out of correcting fluid. Fortunately, my story was a fantasy, so any time I misspelled something, I created a new word. It's a great exercise. Try it sometime. 


So after I nattered on a bit about how I put the book idea aside because I had decided that I needed life skills before I could really write anything that mattered, but hoped to do it one day, she stopped me. "When is that going to happen?" My first reaction was sardonic amusement. When indeed. Who am I kidding? But she stopped me again and said, "Really. When are you going to start?" She had me. I was feeling defensive. "I don't know, maybe when I retire?" She nodded slowly and asked,  "And when will that be?" 


The reality is that it's been thirty years since I wrote that first draft, and maybe another twenty until I retire. Do I really want to be the woman who let fifty years go by before she started making her dreams come true? Life moves pretty fast, according to Ferris Buehler. I decided that it was time to stop storing dreams and start acting on them. So today is the day that I will start with dream number one. 

Turn Six Degrees of Separation into Three

The Hidden Power of Social Networking

LinkedIn is new territory for me. I dipped my toes in the waters a couple of years ago, adding connections but not mining them because, from my Canadian perspective, it’s rude to poke into other people’s business. Checking out my connections’ connections felt like digging into their personal stuff.

I thought LinkedIn was nothing more than a job search site until I read Keith Ferrazi’s book, Never Eat Alone. It’s all about making friends and building stronger business relationships. No longer do we separate our business relationships from our personal relationships. Both work together for the simple reason that we prefer to work with people that we know and like.

Think about it. Would you rather work with a stranger, or a friend? Wouldn’t you want to meet someone your friend recommends?

Making our big world smaller

With social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter, suddenly it’s easier to connect. I can make the big world smaller, reduce the degrees of separation. My network touches other networks.

LinkedIn allows me to reach people more quickly. More importantly, by linking through others, I’m no longer a stranger. I have a level of credibility that I would not have had without the introduction.

Here’s a real-life example. I identified a company that I would like to do business with. I Googled the president, then looked at his profile on LinkedIn. I didn’t have a direct connection, but I had several third-degree links. One of my connections happens to know someone who sits on the board of directors. I sent a request for an introduction to my friend, who promptly responded. And when I say promptly, I mean in two minutes or less.

The very next day, I had coffee with my new connection. We talked about their business and mine, discussed how I could meet my target company president. This meeting could have taken months to schedule. It might never have happened at all if I hadn’t taken the leap and asked my friend to connect me to their friend.

It’s okay to ask a favour from your friend because friendship is about give and take. Now I admire my friend even more because she gets it and was happy to connect me. It has strengthened our relationship. And, of course, she knows she can count on me in future. How great is that?