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Best Practices for Twittering your brand

Best Practices for Twitter

Best Practices for Twitter, part deux

This is a continuation of a series on Twitter best practices, this time focusing on the corporations and organizations out there who have decided to enter the Twittersphere to engage around their brand. First, cool, dudes! Twitter can be a great tool for building relationships, doing research and development and providing personal customer service to your customers, members and fans.

So you're ready to set up your Twitter account. A few items for your checklist:

• Your profile should have a photo that looks like you. Nothing says "Twitter newbie" more than the generic Twitter logo. And nothing says "impersonal corporation" more than your company logo. Use a face of the human that is Twittering.
• Provide a link to your website. Neglecting this is neglecting a primary way for followers to find out more about you than can be said in 140 characters.
• Add a description to your profile, making use of searchable keywords.
• Specify the human who is Twittering for your account. If it's more than one, use the carat and initials to identify the Tweeter each Tweet

As you start Twittering, remember to focus on engaging in conversations with your followers rather than pushing or selling your own products and content. If followers feel they're being sold to, they'll unfollow and block you faster than they'll hang up on your annoying IVR (and then Tweet about it). A few guidelines:

• Use @ replies to comment back to your followers' Tweets
• ReTweet liberally. To reTweet a user's Tweet, simply write "RT @username" and cut and paste the content of the original Tweet. Or just use the RT button if your desktop or smartphone app has one.
• Post links to articles and content you think your users would find interesting. A good guide is Chris Brogan's rule of promoting other people's content eight times more often than you promote your own.
• Post links to your own content, but see above.

For example, a not-so-great Twitter brand account:

A much better Twitter brand account:

Five rules for using Twitter for customer service

The blogosphere is all abuzz with suggestions of using Twitter for customer service. News outlets report that Tweeting a complaint can provide a quick alternative to waiting on hold on the phone or wading through a company's unfathomable IVR. Organizations from Starbucks to Comcast to AlaskaAir have taken to the microblogging platform as a tool for engaging with customers and for address customer service concerns and complaints. Organizations such as Trulia have taken to the platform, using Twitter to answer everything from how to place a listing to finding a local agent to speaker requests.

Personally, I'm a fan of using Twitter for customer service outreach; when implemented properly, it can be a powerful tool for connecting with customers on a personal level. However, implementing Twitter as a platform for customer service needs to be strategized, just as any customer service initiative would be. Twitter customer service agents, like every other representative of your company, need to be properly trained and passionate about helping customers. In short, as with any other initiative, take the time to do it right. Here are five rules to consider:

1. The how is important. How you interact with followers on Twitter is a reflection of your company brand. So take two to four weeks to listen before posting any Tweets. Monitor Twitter for your brand name, company name, product names, and website and blog URL. Monitor for mentions of your competition as well. (Twitter search and BackTweets are helpful with this.) Note what your customers love to talk about, what their interests are (apart from your company and products), what their common complaints are,who their friends are and what social groups they belong to. Use this information to help form your Twitter strategy. Remember that what you think customers need might not be what they think they need.
2. The what is important. Twitter is an excellent channel for providing proactive customer service and building brand loyalty. In addition to answering questions, consider providing valuable content to your fans and followers: links to articles of interest, suggestions of interesting Tweets to follow, coupons and sale information, expected outages or downtime, expert advice. Use those Tweets to start conversations, and engage in conversations that your followers start. Reply and reTweet liberally. In short, use Twitter to engage in conversation with your fans.
3. The who is important. Who should monitor your Twitter feed and engage with customers? An intern? An outside consultancy? A member of your current customer service team? The right answer is: the one who is most passionate about helping your customers. If you have an intern who can reflect the company brand and values while solving customer issues on Twitter, she's the one. If you have a consultant who is in tune with your customer's needs, he's the one. If you have a member of your CS team chomping at the bit to reach out to customers, she's the one. Remember that your Twitter Manager will be the voice of your company to thousands of followers; make the decision carefully. Choose someone who is amiable, open, passionate, service-minded, intimate with your brand and unbothered by slurs or being addressed in all caps.
4. The when is important. As SEOSapien pointed out, "Twitter is lightening fast." And Twitterers expect responses to their queries and complaints to be equally speedy. In response to the question of Twittering for customer service, the estimate Ginevra Kirkland, Community Manager for Typepad's hordes of bloggers, asked: "From the other side of the Twitter, it proposes a challenge: ... Do you sleep?" Frank Eliason of @comcastcares doesn't seem to sleep; his phone is on at all hours, and his team answers Tweets promptly, even in the middle of the night. For you, perhaps it's acceptable for Twitter response times to lag a bit in the wee hours, but during daylight hours, Twitterers expect responses within minutes.
5. The where is important. Twitter is just one channel for communicating with customers. Don't let your customer service on this channel outshine the service available through email, your web site, and the phone. As Mario Schulzke has noted recently in his post, "Is Social Media Killing Customer Service?", some organizations have adopted Twitter as a service tool while failing to address failings in traditional customer service media such as phone and email. B.L. Ochman has noted  nothing else matters if your customer service s*cks--and that applies to your phone and email service, NOT just to Twitter. Using Twitter won't fix your existing bad service, so don't be surprised if you encounter hostility online if you haven't addressed other channels first.

This article is the first in a series on Twitter for customer service--stay tuned.

How to add Related Posts on a Typepad blog

This week, I was reading the excellent John Jantsch over in his Duct Tape Marketing blog (if you don't already read it, really, subscribe today) on a post about blog content being scraped or copied.

He has some great advice for bloggers, including tacking on an RSS Footer plugin (check his original article for the link) and using the Related Posts plugin so that even if your content is scraped, readers will be redirected back to related posts on your blog.

Great advice!

Wait... I'm not on WordPress. Not this blog, at least.

Fortunately, the good folks at TypePad had advice for something similar. The LinkWithin widget will give three, four or five links to related posts in your blog for each entry you post. Just go to the site, fill in your blog address, click which blog you'd like it attached to, and presto!

LinkWithin does favor entries with photos, so keep that in mind. I'm a highly visual person, so no issues there--most of my entries have photos, video, logos, or something else to break up the text. Do make sure that the widget is in the left-hand sidebar, BTW.

The end result is something like this. For my last entry on using Twitter hashtags to communicate during the Atlanta floods, for example, LinkWithin generated these three related posts:

It pulled other articles I'd written tagged "social media" and "Twitter," apparently, and ended up making a pretty good correlation. And even though I only installed it today, it's already working to direct readers to related content--and looks like they are clicking through:

Any other widgets you like for related content on Typepad?

Hashtags help Atlanta

This week, Atlanta has been awash with flooding, with water reaching waist-high in some areas as residents try to save their families and a few belongings.

It's not the news media that is reporting up-to-the-minute information to aid the citizens of Atlanta, however; it's hashtags, as Andria Krewson has noted.

One hashtag in particular: #atlflood. That tag has provided a stream of content for residents to stay informed of new areas of flooding, road closures and even information on when and how to boil safe drinking water. As the flood waters rose, the information stream helped victims and concerned citizens connect, update and educate one another with the latest news.

A lot of questions have risen lately on whether Twitter and other social media platforms are "real" journalism and whether they will replace traditional mainstream media reporting. In a Twitter discussion in the Knight Pulse community, which is designed to discuss the future of news and information needs in a democracy (full disclosure: I'm Community Manager there and handle the Twittter stream), the question arose again today. This time, one member had an insightful comment:

Indeed; why not both? Twitter has its strengths. A TwitPic of flood waters was posted immediately and garnered tens of thousands of views by followers hungry for information:

And the LA Times' coverage was just as newspaper reporting should be: thorough, fact-checked, well-structured, and posted a few hours after the barrage of Tweets and TwitPics that represented bits of citizen information reported via the #atlflood tag. This type of reporting has value. As consumers of news, we have come to expect a level of professionalism and reliability from news outlets such as the LA Times. While we might not be inclined to disbelieve , we also might have some skepticism about some of the news and observations posted to the Twitter steam.

In short, media consumers need both. There is value to the type of information that is available through tools such as a Twitter hashtag: breaking news on where flooding is getting worse, citizen photos, tips, check-ins for safety, advice on evacuation. That is, the type of news that is of immediate help to those in the midst of the situation. There is also a value to the reporting the LA Times provides, the type of aggregation of facts and analysis of the overall situation that is valuable to those not immediately affected by it but interested in the eventual outcome.

Both media can live happily side by side, I'm convinced. I would not want to see a world without responsible, fact-checked, analytical journalism any more than I'd want to see a world in which citizens couldn't communicate immediate news and needs via Twitter.

We need both. We have both. Let's use both.

AT & T doesn't get it

Recently, AT & T created this YouTube video to address increasing customer dissatisfaction with connectivity and internet connection speeds on iPhones. Customers all over the blogosphere, Twittersphere and Facebook have been complaining vociferously about the shoddy service from the iPhone's exclusive carrier.

It was a great idea to make a video to address the concerns. It was a great idea to post the video on YouTube. 

However, the attempt falls flat in its execution, reading more like a boring defense of corporate sluggishness than a genuine attempt to connect with users on a human and personal level. A few suggestions for AT &T:

• If you're going to try to be hip, don't read a script on the video. Make it more conversational. Think the Mac guy.
• Have a sense of humor about the issue; it will encourage your users to have one, too.
• Explanations are nice, but apologies are better.
• Charts and graphics are nice, but humility is better.
• Try starting a conversation: ask users what they would like to see. Remember the users?
• Instead of considering the video an animated press release, consider it the beginning of a cooperative process. Why not use the video to send users to a forum where they can track current progress, make suggestions on innovations and meet both you and other users?
• Save the mind-numbing details of network structure for those who care about it. Remember, David Meerman Scott's mantra: no one cares about your product but you. What users care about is what they do with the product--calling grandma, checking flight status, posting a picture of the kids to Twitter, looking up "creosote" on Wikipedia because it came up in conversation.

The video was a missed opportunity to connect with unhappy customers as real human beings. Instead of providing a corporate explanation with graphics and a carefully-worded press release sent top-down from headquarters, AT&T would do well to have openly apologized and engaged its users in a conversation about their service.

I'm reminded of the very best corporate apology I've ever received: when LibSyn was going through its growing pains, I had some issues with my account. They were small but annoying, as customer service issues usually are. LibSyn fixed them, and Rob emailed me once the corrections were made, saying simply, "Sorry for sucking." The vernacular apology reminded me I was working with a human being who was working hard to get my account back up. To this day, I've never switched off LibSyn's service because of that bit of humanity.

Fun Facebook Facts

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook has rapidly become one of the most popular social networking sites. It grew by 276% in 2008. It has surpassed even Flickr as the most popular photo-sharing site online, with over 15 billion photos being shared. And the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook? Women over 55, who typically use the site to keep in touch with their children and grandchildren.

Facebook is growing and changing every day, and the way that people use it is growing and changing as well. If you're curious about who exactly is using Facebook and how, check out this nifty site: CheckFacebook.com. 

A few fun facts from the site:

1. About half the site's users are aged 18-34
2. The three fastest-growing countries on Facebook are Taiwan, Ghana and Indonesia
3. After the U.S. and the U.K., the country with the largest Facebook participation is Turkey
4. The country with the highest percentage of the population on Facebook is Venezuela, at 63.27%

These stats aren't just interesting; hopefully, they'll help us make the case for Facebook. Or even pave the way for the next new social media tool, whatever it may be.

Thoughts?

Twitter's new Terms of Service

Today, Twitter's Biz Stone posted Twitter's news Terms of Service, a document as elegant and concise in its simplicity as Twitter itself.

Notable is the answer to the question of who owns your Tweets: you. Twitter reserves the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" anything you Tweet, all while clarifying that your content is your content.

As before, Twitter prohibits impersonating others (what? I can't say I'm really Britney Spears?), copyright infringement and illegal activity. New is the definition and steps the microblogging service is taking to reduce spam, including the creation of serial accounts "for disruptive or abusive purposes," name squatting and selling user names. The definition of spam and spam-indicating activities is a clear list, including:

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile

For these, I give Twitter a hearty round of applause. Last week, I sat on a panel where a PR professional recommended getting followers by doing the above. She said, in public, that the way to develop a following on Twitter was to follow the limit of 2,000 users a day, wait a few days, then unfollow all those who didn't follow you back.

Thank you, Twitter, for shutting down this type of menace. Those of us who want to engage in real conversations applaud your efforts to decrease the spam and give us the space to have our dialogue.

Going transparent vs. going overboard

Big thanks to Kevin Stirtz for pointing out this great video that shows how very creepy customer service reps can be when they just plain try too hard.

The message I take away from this is that as much as customer service is about treating the customer like a human being, it is also about being a human yourself. Be open, listen, be accommodating, but don't be that desperate guy at a party saying anything to get the girl: "Really? I like tennis, too. I play every day. You wanna borrow my racket? I'll introduce you to my instructor. Here's a book on how to be a better player. Let's watch Wimbledon together, shall we?"

Ick.

Sales, social media and customer service all have something in common: they work best when the players involved are honest, authentic and transparent. Being yourself might mean sharing something about your own life, sure: "I understand how frustrating that delay can be when you have kids. I have two, myself. Let me see what I can do to help."

But don't change your business model or your personality for your customers. What your mother always said is still true: just be yourself.

[Cross posted to Spoken blog]

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone

It's the season. The best of the best in social media are creating fantastic materials to help you keep up with the waves of social media changes that keep crashing over us weekly. The newest is Six Pixels of Separation by the inestimable Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, 2008's Canada's Most Influential Male in Social Media and host of the Six Pixels of Separation blog and podcast.

Yes, Mitch asked me if I'd give him a shout-out, and I'm delighted to. I've listened to his podcast for years, and his connectedness both inside and outside the social media space is a thing of beauty. I have just ordered the book--haven't read it yet--but I can say with confidence that you will learn something from it.

If you don't, I'll give you your money back. Seriously. Just email me if you read it and don't learn something new.

Not convinced? Stay tuned for a Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter interview with Mitch. Promise you'll learn something from that, too!

DSSP #112: How to be a Trust Agent

Show Notes for Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter #112: How to be a Trust Agent

Coming up on this week's show: a chat with Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents, on how to participate and reach out in the social age.

Direct download is here.

00:00 Introduction

Welcome to DSSP! Send comments to OUR COMMENT EMAIL: [email protected], call 206-209-0806 and be sure to check the Talk It Up! blog. Sounders are graciously provided by BuzzCutzAudio.com. If you're interested in podcasting, check out all the free resources at www.podcastingprincess.com.

Interview: Julien Smith of Trust Agents

• one of us: become part of a group
• find the Agent Zero
• evergreen philosophies, not tactics
•  trust agents, tipping points, long tails
• make your own game
• lead the pack

Listener questions:

 
A: Differentiate yourself by doing something no one else does. (e.g. quotes)

Kenji_Onozawa: Q: What was the aha! moment for the book?

A: Met Sashi from Network Solutions at SOBCon 2008 and were impressed by his just showing up and not trying to sell; what do people like him do to succeed. And at the bar, "trust agent" was born.

A: Poutine.

Kenji_Onozawa: Q: Any negative/surprising feedback?

A: Universally positive so far.

Wrap-up

Why not recommend Diary to a friend? Send the link via email and spread the word! Visit us at Blubrry.com; email Heidi at [email protected] and don't forget to visit the show blog, Talk It Up! during the week, for articles and updates. Thanks for listening!