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Ideas on how to create customer experiences that drive word of mouth and result in customer loyalty for life!

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How grow your brand on Twitter

October 5, 2009 by Jorge Branding / Social Media Tags:/ / /

Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

 

Interesting panel at Twittercon moderated by Guy Kawasaki. Here are some highlights with some of my thoughts:

Quality or quantity of followers.

There are differing views around this topic, but it’s important to understand everyone has a different strategy (if any). In my professional opinion I think what matters most is the actual relationship you build with a close few. In essence ‘pick your poison’. What I mean by this is that you pick your talkers and other talkers will emerge, if you can influence a certain number of your followers then they can influence their followers.

Because unless you’re well known like Guy Kawasaki your tweets will be lost in an endless sea of digital thoughts.

 

How to Tweet and what to tweet about.

This is an often asked question and it’s hard to put a concrete answers behind it but it all boils down to asking yourself: Does it add value? Is interesting to them?

 

When to Tweet.

How often should you tweet? My suggestion, as often as you have something interesting to say. Like I mentioned everyone has a different strategy, maybe you want to spend more time in conversation and less on sharing information, depending on this circumstance match your behavior.

A strategy that was mentioned is to schedule a Tweet multiple times in a day. This is interesting because if you have a large number of followers most of them are not online at the same time and thus gives you an opportunity to reach people at different intervals.

Tools: , ,

 

What apps to use.

Among the apps mentioned were , , Tweetie (for iPhone), Co-Tweet and the web interface.

 

 

In what other ways do you use Twitter for branding?

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How to communicate what matters to your audience

October 5, 2009 by Jorge Communication Tags:/ / / /

When people come to our website, blog, Twitter, FB they want to know why should I do business with you? and we need to be able to make them care.

As humans one of our favorite things to do is talk about ourselves. Me, me, me, me! It’s a natural human tendency to do so. In business this is even a bigger problem because our ability to create new business depends on how we communicate (what matters) the benefits of our product or service to our audience.

When all we do is push our message of how great we are to prospects, we block others out because we’re not telling them why they should care and so it’s harder (if not impossible) for us to influence them. What they really want to hear is ‘what’s in it for me?’

I just finished reading a fabulous book written by Mark Magnacca called .

It provides an invaluable framework we can use to communicate what matters to prospective audiences when they visit our websites, when we’re networking or just when we meet new people.

 

Formula for answering ‘What do you do?’

Mark gives some great advice in actionable steps. Something I particularly liked was the So What Positioning Statement Generator:

Step 1: Determine the issues your clients and prospects face.

Step 2: What are the 3 things you do to address these concerns?

Step 3: Choose the most relevant of these 3 concerns and then the best answer from Step 2 that addresses it.

 

Once you have these put them in this format: Do you know how…(insert primary concern). Well, what I do is (insert what you do to address the concern).

 

Here’s how one person used this formula:

Mark: What do you do?

Floyd: Do you know how many people don’t like the process of buying a new car because they don’t like dealing the salespeople?”

Mark: Yes.

Floyd: Well, what I do, for $295, is take people through a 15-point process designed to help them determine the exact right car for them, and then I go with them to the dealership to negotiate the best price.”

 

That’s it! Didn’t that example get your attention? As you can see the framework is very intuitive. If you want to see this framework in action in an interview.

 

Key takeaway: If you want to be better at persuading and gaining interesting from prospective clients, I honestly suggest you read I’ve already sent a few copies to my team and other colleagues.

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Must read digital marketing stories of the week: Dell takes social media companywide

October 3, 2009 by Jorge Weekly must reads

This weeks must read digital marketing story is Dell’s strategy for social-media communications has grown from a staff of 40 workers to a companywide effort to engage customers. "While a core social-media team remains, the marketing, sales, service and support, and product groups all need to have their own fingers on the pulse and arms around their customers," writes Richard Binhammer, Dell’s senior manager in corporate communications.

 

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Social Media Optimization 101

October 2, 2009 by Jorge Social Media Tags:/ / /

It’s been almost 4 years since the word social media started being thrown around, it’s now become part of our daily talk that’s it’s just referred to as ‘social’. Still many businesses large and small don’t quite get it and most importantly are not ready for it.

How do you get started?

First let me explain what social media optimization is.

Where search engine optimization (SEO) is about making sure your website can rank in search results, social media optimization (SMO) is about making sure visitors to your website can share your content with their colleagues, friends or family.

Bottom line SMO is about making it easy for people to share your stuff.

 

See all those delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed icons on websites around the internet, even on popular news sites and wondered why they’re there for? Now you know.

 

Now let’s be clear, just putting those icons around your site is NOT going to make your visitors share your content (we’ll leave this for another post), you’ll just make it easier for them if they get the ‘itch to share’.

On we go.

3 Things you can do right now to make it easy for people to share your content.

 

  • Put a in every page of your website. It can be a form with fields or a plugin with the words ‘Tell a friend’ that when clicked gives the user an array of options to share.
  • Add a plugin to your blog. Like the one we use here, educated audiences know that when they see this icon it means share. If you’re audience is not that educated we recommend you get creative and add social icons below the post, a good example of a site that does this is . They use BIG icons at the end of each post!
  • Create a spread page. If you have a product with an established fan base, create a page that contains the things you’ve like them to share with their friends. Ex. Glue has such a that does just this.

 

In what other ways are you making it easier for people to share your content? Share in the comments.

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Convey everything in 7 words or less

September 30, 2009 by Jorge Communication Tags:/ / /

Twitter is talk of the town right now and the topic that gets the most attention is the art of the retweet. Now we have people coming up with formulas on , not to mention scientific research on .

If you want to get retweeted and this is way above your head, let me put things a little more simple. Let me explain.

 

In their book Made to Stick authors Chip and Dan Heath propose a framework that can help us communicate our ideas and make sure people remember them. Using their  (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible,Emotional, Story) to guide our thinking it also important to remember the “7 words or less” concept.

In 1956 cognitive psychologist George A. Miller suggested that , it appears to have finite capacity. The formula he came up with to explain this capacity was 7+/- items. Decades later is was determined to be roughly 2.5 seconds of information.

 

What this means is that in order for your message to remembered and be worthy of mention (retweeted), you need to structure your messages in 7 words or less.

Twitter is a great example of a tool that puts this concept to the test. With only 140 characters to write your message, you have to get to the point. To date the best formula that I’ve found to work is to . Nothing complex about that!

With consumers getting bombarded with messages that want their attention every second of the day, getting their attention is a challenge. But using the SUCCES framework to get our ideas across is in a short (7 words or less), simple and concrete way we stand a better chance at getting theirs and everyone’s attention.

 

Key takeaway: People are better at remembering messages with 7 words or less.

 

Is there a different formula you follow to get more retweets?

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