Online Social Engagement is Lacking in Modern Singapore
Singapore is a great modern city in the Asia Pacific region. I live here and proud to be a Singaporean. Singapore is one of the fastest growing economy in the world today. However, in my opinion, except our hotel industry, many Singapore companies here are still lacking in what I defined as “online social engagement” with their prospects and customers. Amazingly, we are still pretty much far behind from others.
Everyone, Your Customers, Your Employees or even Your Competitors' "Spies" Can Become Your Company Spokesperson.
Online social engagement is consider as a new way of public communications. It is simply engaging your existing customers as well as potential prospects on the internet one on one. Today, we see that it is highly significant to do social engagement; this is because with the advent of Web 2.0 and beyond, everyone can be a spokesperson for a particular product, company, celebrity or even part of the government sector. He or she may or may not work in that company. The internet has somehow “personalize” the company or product.
When I mentioned about anyone can be a spokesperson of the company; it can also mean the competitor, the hater, the customer or simply anyone on the street. That means your company or organization are opened to criticisms as well as praises. Hence, there is a very critical need to have an individual department body in the company to focus on online social engagement. Yet, we seldom see companies or MNCs in Singapore doing their own online social engagement except for those in the hotels industry. Much companies and organizations still prefer the “I Speak, You Listen” method when they do their PR. If complaints arises online, they either ignore it or simply sent a lawyer letter to sue the poster. Online social engagement is still seen as a long way to go for most companies but as a performing marketer for your company, you should start and initiate this immediately so as to prepare your company anytime should the time come.
You will never know when you need to do online social engagement, by the time you knew it, it will be too late. So you should start today.
Here is how to start doing your online social engagement:
Say Sorry for the Mistakes You Make Regards to your Products and Services; People will Respect You.
1. Subscribe Google Alert for your company keyword. The reason why is because whenever somebody mentioned about your company and is indexed on Google, you will know immediately. If the mention is neutral or good, it be ok for you. However, if the mention is a complaint, you will need to resolve it immediately. This is because once the page is indexed on Google, forever it will be. If it is a popular complaint page, it will soon be listed on the first page of Google and cost you tons and tons of potential prospects for your business!
2. Be Honest. Every company, big or small, makes mistakes. Because companies have people working for them and people are not 100% perfect. When the comments on the internet is true, says sorry and tell the complainer that if he or she wants to sue your company they can do so, but you will not run away from the mistake you made, you will solve the issue with them together. Admit the mistake you made, and take action to rectify it.
3. What about malicious remarks made by your competitors pretending to be your clients? This can happen if your company is large and leading your industry. The first thing you should do is to apologize and investigate immediately. Be a gentleman even if you know that the person who post the comment is dishonest. The next step you should do is to reply online to ask the “complainer” to message you his or her invoice number, when is the date they came to your office or buy your product. If they are not able to produce the evidence for their complaint, you will need to publicize again that you will only resolve their problems if they produced genuine receipts or proof of their buying their products at your premises. This is to show prospects that this is clearly an online slander craftily build to tarnish your company reputation.
4. Improve on yourself. Since you have made the mistakes, apologized for it; and move on. Improve to be better in your products and services thereafter. Don’t run away when people said things about your organization, face them with your sincerity.
In summary, social engagement is a must for every organization to practice in their daily work operation. Online social engagement is not a complicated thing to do. All you need to do is to be sincere, honest and responsible towards whatever that is said about you on the internet.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 10th, 2011. 
Marketing on Facebook may have gotten a little bit easier thanks to the release of a couple of tools for analyzing Facebook brand pages. For starters, Facebook released updates to its Page Insights product to help brands better understand how their page is performing.
WebProNews spoke with Justin Kistner, the Director of Social Products at Webtrends, which is a company that was included in the Alpha testing of Facebook’s new product. He told us that the new Facebook Insights tool focuses more on measuring engagement and not just fan growth.
Incidentally, Webtrends also introduced a tool called Hoverstats that allows page owners to evaluate the effectiveness of their posts. He said the idea behind both tools is to help brands determine whether or not they are reaching and engaging with their fans.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 7th, 2011.
Last week I shared with you a series of CEO quotes that came from the most recent CEO Connection Boot Camp in New York City. At these day-long events, CEOs of companies with more than $ 100 million in revenues gather to discuss their most pressing challenges, and to share experiences and advice.
From these discussions I was able to share with you 19 revealing CEO leadership quotes and 10 insightful CEO social media quotes that provide a peek into the world of today’s CEO, and some insight into what’s currently on their minds.
I noticed there were a few quotes in each blog post that were consistently resonating with people, and I realized there was a reason for this…:
Leadership Quotes:
- “When we wrote a mission statement at the corporate level the words didn’t resonate with our employees. So we asked the employees to rewrite it in a way that made sense for all of us.”
- “We created a new brand promise and our sales force resisted it. I asked them to take ownership and rewrite it, and was actually very touched by what they wrote.”
- “How many of your employees woke up this morning with the express intention of doing a crappy job? Probably very few. But if they feel left out, or have a fear of failure or uncertainty, they are less able to succeed.”
- “I want people to say they work with me and not for me.”
Social Media Quotes:
- “I recently started tweeting and my employees love it; they can’t get enough of it. I tweet about the meetings I’m in and general observations, which seems basic, but they better understand what I do.”
- “Our employees’ wives love our Facebook page and are our most active group on it. They’re our advocates.”
- “I recently started blogging and every time I meet with employees they implore me not to stop. They really love it.”
- “We advise our employees that when they’re using social media they should use social grace – and we trust them to do so.”
Have you already guessed what these quotes have in common? They come from the very same, small group of CEOs.
These CEOs understand engagement at its deepest level; it springs from a genuine feeling of trust and a sense of responsibility. They are actively interested in engaging their employees and their quotes show that they trust them and want them to succeed. This interest and trust naturally translate into a willingness to actively engage them via social media.
And these are the CEOs that are encouraging their teams to embrace active social media engagement with their customers.
The CEO Becomes the Rock Star
I was genuinely encouraged to discover this among these CEOs and it reminded me of the premise Mack Collier has been advocating; think like rock stars do by embracing your fans. As Mack says, “note what Rockstars do; They focus on the people that already love them… this group has a strong degree of loyalty for the rockstar. So much so, that they will go out and actively recruit people from the OTHER groups to the left to come join them. And yes, we have stats to back that up as well.”
Now, let’s put CEOs in the Rock Stars shoes. CEOs that actively engage with their employees in the way rock stars do with their fans will reap the same benefits: they’ll cultivate loyal employee evangelists who will be trusted to tell the company’s story in social media and who will ultimately “recruit” customers to join them in their love for the company and its products.
But it all starts with a natural leadership proclivity to engage, to trust, and to want others to succeed that comes from the top.
That’s my theory, at least. What do you think?
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 5th, 2011.
I attended the New Media Age’s “Social Media – Building a Strategy for your Business” (#nmalive) event last week – as I was intrigued to hear from O2 and the BBC - to see how they were managing and engaging from a large brand perspective – and indeed to hear the UK’s Group Head of Agency Sales from Facebook, to better understand their plans going forward.
The line up
- Chris Buckley, Head of Agency, Headstream (very good)
- David Parfect, Group Head of Agency Sales, Facebook (excellent but got a hard time)
- Sophie Brendel, Head of Digital Engagement, BBC (lucid and on point)
- Alex Pearmain, Head of Social Media, O2 (entertaining and clearly a bright young thing)
- Conor Ryan, Co-Founder and COO, Betapond. (would have like to have heard more)
It was a lively and purposeful event (just 3 hours) – and the focus was very much on ‘brand engagement’ and how
agencies (those managing those brands) should be considering leveraging the platforms. I enjoyed it – and agreed with 98% of what they were talking about, therefore, I didn’t learn that much from a ‘how to’ perspective, but viewed some useful case studies, and I met some interesting people over coffee and connected with some new relevant folk via Twitter.
Of course – when reading Marketing Week or attending such an event – the entire focus is around ‘big brands’ – how the likes of O2, the BBC, Proctor & Gamble, BT, Kraft, Nike etc are engaging with consumers.
Such brands in many ways should find it easy to engage in the social platforms, as they and their products already have large ‘fan bases’ of loyal consumers just waiting to be engaged with on the social channels. Hence why the likes of Coca Cola has a Facebook Page with around 35,000,000 people that like it.
Now, I’m not saying that the brand on its own will conjure up such followings – but it certainly helps. What also helps is the fact that such huge brands already have design teams and creative teams readily to hand – and usually large marketing budgets at the ready to create the all important ‘creative and compelling’ campaigns designed to engage consumers.
Compelling Content is Key
I’ve said this before and I will continue to say it – content is king. The content that you share on the social platforms is more important now than ever before. And for some businesses and brands, this is easier than for others. For example: some of the compelling content out of the BBC is the programs they create, think of Strictly Come Dancing. There’s already a whole fan base at the ready to engage with. The program is the compelling content. So for brands such as the BBC or others that have ‘natural’ compelling content to share (just by the nature of what they do) – content creation is going to be simpler. For small businesses, that don’t naturally have ‘compelling content’ to share – then they have to start thinking about what content they can create that is going to be newsworthy and compel others to share it and engage with it. They need to be building a ‘content strategy’ into their planning.
Creativity and Ingenuity are key drivers
Of course, it’s not just about the ‘brand’ but also about the execution and this is where I believe most businesses, and indeed many brands fall down from a ‘skill set’ perspective.
Thinking creatively about how you can be engaging consumers is a tough call for most. Hence why creative agencies such as Saatchi’s, McCann, Mother, Grey, Leo Burnett, JWT (and others) are revered as superstars in the advertising and communications world – with leading brands seeing their partnership with them as a badge of honour.
And it’s these large agencies, and the thousands of less known, smaller and much smaller (yet still equally capable) agencies – that are striving to come to terms with how they leverage the social media channels.
The same basic marketing principles apply to social media marketing, as they do to any other form of marketing:
- Listening (doing research into the market)
- Relevancy (considering which message and mode is relevant for which audience)
- Targeting (creating targeted compelling content and messaging, campaigns for that specific audience)
- Engaging (ongoing conversations – developing loyalty, being creative in how you engage)
- Action (call to actions, getting the consumer ultimately to do what you want them to do)
- Measuring (understanding impact and continuous learning)
The overriding challenge with ‘social’ – is that the pace is such that reach and response levels are running faster than any other medium. People can respond in real time – and at any time – and so brands, businesses and agencies need to be equipped to manage such ‘networked’ and constant communications and responses in an engaging and purposeful way.
There’s no point having a Facebook Page and investing in a campaign to engage consumers if no one is then given responsibility to manage those responses and continuously work to engage those engaging. Better to do nothing at all than do it badly.
So, for all brands and businesses great and small – the key message is, think about what you have that you can be sharing – what’s your compelling content, who, what, where and when and how will you encourage customers to engage with you and share with others to grow your reach.
Think creatively about how you engage. You don’t have to have a huge marketing budget to get creative – try new things, create a think tank and get some ideas going, watch what others are doing that’s working and think about what you too can be doing. But get creative.
The social media channels provide the chassis – and very sophisticated, exciting and far reaching ones at that. However, what they don’t do is ‘do all the hard work for you’ (which many brands, agencies and businesses seem to expect).
If you take one message from this article it’s – “What you do on the social media channels is totally up to you”.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 21st, 2011.
Traditionally, engagement is measured with consumption being the primary activity: watching TV, listening to the radio and reading newspapers are all great examples of how classic engagement was easily transitioned to the social Web via YouTube, podcasts and blogs. However, while these traditional consumption models did translate, the consumption is not at all engaging and does little to connect customers to brands.
If you’re looking to get beyond content spread and really make a connection with your customers, here are a few tips that will make engaging your social audience much more meaningful.
Hit the honey hole
Face it; most of your customers are not flocking to your branded microsites. When the fish aren’t biting it’s time to head to the honey hole! Engage your customers on the social sites that they are already members of. Additionally, most social sites like Facebook and Twitter will provide you with rich demographic information about your fans that your branded microsites can’t.
Curation sensation
In the social Web context, content curation is the act of sharing, rating and organizing content with your social networks. Rating, reviewing, digging, liking and +1’ing are all examples of curation.
Why should you care about curation? Two reasons:
1. It provides your content with value and context because it has been rated and organized by the consumer’s social network.
2. It’s an easy way to get people engaged. Clicking the like button takes less than 5 seconds and your content also gets thousands more impressions. In fact, it’s so easy that most of last year’s successful user-generated content campaigns leveraged curation as the primary engagement tool. Threadless has used curation for the past ten years to have their fans rate t-shirt ideas before they produce them.
Game on
There is a reason board games are still popular after thousands of years. People love to compete (and brag). Create a campaign that allows your fans to compete with each other, socialize their contributions and be rewarded for their participation.
There are several toolsets out there that will allow you to easily set up new Facebook contests (that include curation tools) and will also track your fan’s engagement levels. Badging and points are also standard for most of these tools. One vendor, Fangager, even has an app store that allows you to drag and drop some pretty slick interactive games onto your Facebook fan page.
So don’t be satisfied with the status quo when putting your next customer engagement program together. Challenge yourself to get out there and meaningfully engage your customers on existing social networking sites by making it easy for them to curate content and participate in contests. Remember what they say … “Consumption is good, but engagement is better”.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Aug 27th, 2011.
