Social Media Is Not Busy Work, It's Business Intelligence

While social media gurus push hard for businesses to be busy writing content, posting links, and sharing media, most businesses can't help but become discouraged by what appears to be a lot of work without an obvious connection to sales.

While I see the matter quite differently, I understand the barrier and believe it exists because not everyone understands the real opportunity social media presents.

Business Intelligence Is the Big Prize

I have said many times that social media is in its infancy. But even at this early stage, gathering data and painting a picture of what a customer wants, why they want it, and how you succeed or fail to provide it is the great gift of social media.

Today there are powerful tools that give us an enormous amount of data that could employ teams of people to interpret. But it will get easier over time as tools provide more value beyond just the data. Even now, by staying focused on continuously improving your method of gathering data and interpreting it to honestly answer the big questions will keep you ahead of customer expectations and ahead of your competitors.

Start With a Question

Social media doesn't become social until business leaders become curious about their customers. Curiosity will create questions that you desperately need answered and those questions should start conversations that can help you give a better service worth paying for.

Start with a question you really need to have answered and start asking that question online. Ask it through the pictures, videos, blogs and tweets that you share, and answer the comments as they come in with conversation.

Social Media Strategy Belongs With Those Who Set Business Strategy

All of the traditional business functions need to take part in this effort. Public relations, marketing, sales, and human resources need to participate in the brand community but social media isn't just a benefit to any one of them and should not be owned by any one of them.

Social media is a lever that serves the bigger goals of the company and needs to be led by the leaders of the business, not any one department.

Here's my question that will help me serve you better: Who owns social media for your business and why?

If I Can't Find You, I Can't Hire You

If I want to find you online, can I? Five minutes of searching for my name on Google, LinkedIn, or Twitter should easily produce options to learn a bit about me, what I do, and - most importantly - how to reach me. And if a simple search like that doesn't yield results, I'm in big trouble.

Following on a great post by Trent Seely early this year on this concept for finding a new career, I think it's important to point out that the same need to be found and reached applies to those of us who need to constantly grow our network of connections and online reputation to grow our careers.

There's a lot of talk about search engine optimization, content creation and socializing online to grab attention so your target customer finds you and becomes interested in you. But what if a customer already knows who you are and wants to buy what you sell? Can they find you and connect with you?

We Meet Our Needs in Different Ways

This won't come as much of a shock, but most people don't look for people or businesses in the phone book any more. Organization-based business directories that are isolated from the mainstream services like Google+ Local or LinkedIn are of limited value. People who want to find you will go first to the tools that have given them the best results in the past and it's been a long time since the yellow pages has been the trusted resource it used to be.

Google Search is still #1 and should find something on you that will allow me to connect with you. Is it your LinkedIn profile? Your about.me page? Your business website? A news item you were featured in? Whatever it is, how many more clicks will it take me to send you an email or find your phone number.

Social Search is basically searching for keywords or user accounts on any of the online social networks (Google now being one of them). On Twitter you can find me and you can find posts in which my name was mentioned in a tweet. From there you can mention me and I'll hear it or send me a private Direct Message if we are already following each other.

On LinkedIn you will find me and 212 others with the same name as me. Because my photo, business name, location, and industry are all listed in the search results, you only need to identify one of those things to identify me, click my profile, and send me a message.

Google+ and Facebook are very similar in that people tend to be a lot less diligent about keeping their profiles complete and current on those channels. This is not wise since Facebook currently has the largest population of any social network and your Google+ profile is most likely to be found in a Google search, the granddaddy of search options.

Non-Existent - Cannot Be Found or Connected With

I worked with a large, international consulting company in 2011 and conducted a high level audit of 30 regional leaders before an off site session with them. I created a 10-point non-scientific scale (based on a few measuring scales like Klout and PeerIndex) to give me a sense of where they are at so I could help them. At the top end of the scale was "10 - Thought Leader, who has a large, niche audience, whose content is often amplified, and trusted." At the bottom end was "0 - Non-Existent- cannot be found or connected with."

From this senior group of consultants, in a company dependent entirely on the strength and reputation of their people, no one scored above a 2. Described as "2 - Observer - accounts on 3 networks, little to no activity." It isn't until 4 on the scale that "strong profiles" that allows people to connect easily emerges on the scale. Consider the challenges a business like this will face in the coming years as online reputations are increasingly important and their greatest asset - their people - have no online reputation to speak of.

It's Not Social But It's a Start

I have counselled many times that just getting accounts and not using them is not good for business. People won't want to connect with you on a social channel if it is obvious that you don't use it.

However, having complete profiles with the options turned on for visitors to connect with you directly is an open door for those who know already that they'd like to talk to you. And that's a great start.

Do you still find it hard to find some people you want to hire or connect with online?

The Biggest Myths About Social Media

What are the biggest myths of social media and social business that you have come across as a consultant or have dispelled as you have learned more about social media use in business?

This is not meant to mock the wrong-headed but to be a collection to help others steer clear of misconceptions that can take them down the wrong path or lead them away from a great opportunity. Here are a few from my list:

• Social media is a fad. It's too much work to post and people will get tired of it.
• Social media is just a new broadcast channel for marketing
• If I build it they will come - setting up accounts will do the trick

The 3 things on my list were easy to choose as they are incredibly common. If you end up blogging about any of the items on your list or have good resources to support them, please share links with your list.

What are the biggest social media myths from your experience? Please share in the comments.

The Facebook IPO and The Market Value of Trust

For those among us that follow the social business space and use the social medium to further relationships and to establish and build trust, the recent controversy around the Facebook initial public offering (IPO) has to seem a bit ironic.

Facebook is now the largest, and some would argue most pervasive of the social channels; a place where people come together to connect, share and nurture relationships - and build trust. Facebook is now the subject of a potential lawsuit from investors who claim the social network didn’t let them know all there was to know in the days and hours leading up to its offering to public investors.

Trust Is The Foundation of Investing in Relationships and Markets

For sure, Morgan Stanley and the slate of other underwriters who were shepherding the company through this process will now have to deal with an issue of mistrust (something they’ve seen before), but the bigger point here is that this whole story highlights the massive importance of trust up front – in relationship building, in corporate management and governance and certainly when it comes to investing.

This last point can be examined from a few different angles. Investors who are taking direction from givers of advice need to have significant trust – that goes without saying, I think. No one is going to entrust their life savings to someone where trust is lacking.

Interestingly, though, trust is also at the very foundation of the investment process. That’s because when you invest in the shares of a business, what you really are doing is investing in the leadership and management team to ethically and responsibly grow the equity value for you – the shareholder.

Even after you have done all of your analysis and due diligence, at the end there is a leap of faith the investor must take. If you can’t trust management and directors by virtue of their actions and words, how can you have trust that your investment is in good hands?

Besides the safety and well-being of our families, our finances and investments require trust in anyone we let into that part of our lives more than anything else. It is our livelihood and the measure of our ability to live the lives we choose. For Facebook to be perceived as falling down in a test of trust in this fundamentally important domain is really ironic.

The Foundation Needs Repair

From my perspective, this is now part of the battle that Facebook has to wage. Trust has been tarnished. Whatever level of trust they have built among their user base over time and in their brand, I have to think has now been set back, at least a little.

Surely, there are a significant number of users among their new investor base. And, that Facebook's IPO, a most significant and memorable event in any company’s history, appears now to be mired in a controversy of trust means that they now have a longer road back to the level of trust they had even a week ago.

Now that the shares are changing hands in US markets, another question is whether the valuation on the business was fair. But, what is the market value of trust?

I’d say it’s immeasurable. How about you?

Subscribe to Trevor’s new bi-weekly email of insight into trust-based investing to launch on May 31.

Another Prediction of the Demise of Google+

The simple observation is that Google+ is trying to be Facebook and won't make it because it doesn't have the same critical mass of mainstream users. I say "yet". Comparing Google+ to Facebook is like comparing the dashboard of a BMW to an entire Mercedes Benz. The right comparison, if there is one, is to compare Google with Facebook.

Yesterday I read yet another commentary on the demise of Google+ by a myopic marketer using a tool that is less than a year old and couldn't resist a rebuttal. In this age of rapid innovation and transient clientele, it is not wise to dismiss any new connecting tool in the social space, especially one created by the world's greatest conduit to data, knowledge, and online culture.

Comparing Apples to Thanksgiving Turkey Dinners

Comparisons between Google+ and Facebook only account for the time that people spend looking at each of their stream-like social interfaces. In the same way that you might send messages, sign up for an event, or link to an article or video from Facebook, Google's offering needs to be similarly regarded.

To look at Google+ in its entirety, it's necessary to account for how much people use services like Youtube, Gmail, Google Drive (formerly Docs), Google Maps, Google Search etc. (and that's a big etc!)

Google+ is the sharing backbone of Google - all of Google - every service they have in their formidable collection of useful services. I'm confident that Facebook isn't nearly as dismissive of the challenge Google presents as some of the pundits are.

Facebook Needs To Be Popular

As Facebook launches its new career as a public company today, more than a few analysts recently have acknowledged that the Facebook product IS the people who use it. Without the content that we, the users, share into our news feed (sorry, "Timeline"), there is no Facebook and the network's success depends on it continuing to be the place where the critical mass visits and shares regularly. As soon as it loses our interest, even a little, the house of cards is likely to fall.

The argument that Google+ is less potent because less people use it than Facebook is valid - from a Facebook point of view. The reason we use Facebook is because a critical mass of the people we know are there. That's why I use and enjoy it every day.

In contrast, Google+ continues to grow at an astonishing rate despite not possessing that critical mass of people we know. Millions of people have found Google+ useful for reasons other than the one reason we all use Facebook. Imagine what will happen if and when it does reach a tipping point and your parents and kids start sharing their lives with you by hitting the +1 continuously across the entire web.

That observation is why I continue to recommend this new network, still in its infancy, to my clients and friends.

Top: A pic of the Ford Edsel, often the symbol of commercial failure. That won't be Google's fate any time soon.

Note: Yes, I changed the title of this post. I thought it was too harsh. Reading another commentary taking a a surface view of the matter got the best of me.

How To Get Into Google+: Share Everything

The best way to get into Google+ is to get into the habit of sharing everything.

For a long time I have advised clients and friends to spend more time listening online and worry less about what to share. By listening we can find conversations to start or jump into and truly enjoy social interactions.

So my advice to become a sharing fiend to really get into Google+ may sound contradictory but I think it is the best way to let yourself get sucked in and appreciate what this powerful network has to offer.

Share Because You Can

Whenever we come across something we like online we don't react to it by sharing all of it because we know (or should know) that we'll drive our friends and followers crazy if we do. Most social networks are giant soapboxes through which everyone we're connected to can see everything we share. Sure, Facebook offers other sharing options but they are not intuitive and rarely used.

With Google+ nothing gets shared at all without first selecting one or more circles to share them with. If you want to share something with everyone, it's as simple as selecting the Public circle and sharing.

But here's the difference: when I snap a photo of my kids doing something cute my thought doesn't jump to sharing it because I consider that to be private and personal. Unless there was a way to just share it with my immediate family or close friends, which there is with Google+.

So now, for me, I just share everything and select the right groups to share each thing with. Google+ makes it easy to make that choice and when I use the smartphone app it uploads everything I create automatically so I just need to select who to share it with and I'm done.

Sharing Leads To Engagement

While over sharing leads to disengagement on most networks, on Google+ it leads to more engagement because not everyone is going to see everything you share. You may still only share the same number of things with everyone that you do on Facebook, but you may share so much more with your hiking circle, your curling team circle, your jogging buddies, your family, or whatever other circles you've created. And if you are thoughtful with how you curate your circles they will rarely overlap.

The result is that you'll have content that others will see, comment on, share and +1 that will pull you into the network naturally, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

So have fun sharing. It's what the network was built for and once you get into it you'll find it more natural than you expected. Maybe in time you will back off a bit, but to really get into it, let yourself loose with sharing for a while and get in the habit of choosing which content is right for each circle of relationships. For me, it has resulted in Google+ becoming my favourite online social channel. I don't even email my wife any more when I find something interesting, I just hit the +1 button, and enter her name.

If you're staying away from Google+ because "no one is there", be one of the first ones who is. What else is keeping you from jumping in?

Feature Update | Removing a Barrier to Learning: Sociallogical Learn Gets Single Sign-On

 

We all know that small things can make big differences and signing in to an online service can be a big pain for a lot of people. So, to make things easy for our learners, we have installed a single sign-on (SSO) service so people can sign on to our courses using their Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts instead of needing to remember yet another password.

This is the first in a list of feature and usability improvements we are rolling out this month all to serve one purpose: to make Sociallogical Learn the ideal environment for business people to learn social business and to mentor each other through the big changes of the coming decade.

Setting Up Single Sign-On

If it's your first time using Learn, just click one of the social icons to the right to get started with SSO. Once you select a service, you're walked through the rest of the process and a Learn account will automatically be created for you.

Already using Learn? You can still make use of this convenience.

1. Sign in to your account if you haven't already,
2. open the User Menu on the right hand side of the Learn bar and
3. hit My Account.
4. Click Social Accounts, followed by
5. Add Linked Account and then follow the onscreen process.

When you're done, you can forget about your Learn password and just use SSO to sign on in the future!

How it Works

It's quite simple really - we are simply linking your social accounts to your Learn account. These relationships are then automatically saved and remembered for future use.

We know that passwords are a pain for most people - they are often a pain for us. So we hope this simple improvement makes life a little bit easier for our learners by making it easier to visit us more often and find out what's new in social business.

Why Your Location Matters in Your Online Profiles

You are not from "everywhere", "the world", "the globe", or "the web". You are a human with your feet planted somewhere on the earth that influences your view of the world, your business, and your society. So tell us where it is so we can get to know you better.

Whenever someone new connects with me on a social network I check out their profile to find out if they are a real person, and a few other characteristics I have mentioned in earlier posts. And one of those key characteristics is a person's location. More than almost any other profile element, location gives me context for that person. And when a new connection doesn't tell me where they are or where they've been it significantly lowers the likelihood that I will add them to my list of people I want to listen to.

We All Care About Place

Where we live and where we have lived in the past influences how we see the world as much, in my opinion, as our education and work history. I know that every city I have lived in has had a significant influence on me, both while I was living there and after I left (that's one of the reasons why I love the "places I have lived" section of the Google+ profile). Think about the top 5 questions you ask someone new that you meet at a trade show, webinar or when you're away on vacation. I'm willing to bet that "where are you from?" is on that list.

So it's best not to be coy or cute about where you live and just tell us. It doesn't have to be a street address or your detailed latitude and longitude coordinates (The long code after "UT" that very precise people use). Just your neighbourhood, city, state, or region. Something that gives the people you want to connect with you a sense of where you are in the world so we know a little more of who you are so we can get to know you better.

How do you feel about sharing your location? Is there a reason why you are ambiguous that overrides a potential friend's need to get to know you a bit better?

Culture Shift | The End of Small Talk, Part 1

Before social media, many believed that small talk held us together. It was how we kept things at the surface where we could show courtesies, respect, and basic kindness and stay away from areas of friction. Small talk, they said, was the fabric that held our society together. Instead, I believe we just wasted a century talking about the weather.

Religion, politics, sex, crime, children, and money are all discussed openly through social media. Real debate occurs now. There are few taboos. Many of the limits society placed on itself in earlier generations are gone and it is liberating and energizing. Every day we learn about and discuss issues that matter.

That's the positive view. The dark side of this is that many are not part of this exchange and have opted out because they fear and misunderstand this new world. I hope this changes.

Many say social media reduces our privacy, and I agree. The fundamental difference between the previous generation and this one is that this one generally doesn't see that as a bad thing. It is an issue of culture and values and the "you're either with us or against us" paradigm labels these big 21st century changes as "bad" or "good". Privacy: good. Openness: bad.

Collaboration was a buzzword in the last century. It is the model for this one.

Some think that too many people share meaningless things through social media. It keeps us "communicating" too much of the time so we spend less time living and relating to each other in a real way. Hogwash.

What social media does is bring public places into our personal space. We now have access to the city centre, the marketplace, the sports field, or the trade show floor wherever we are, whenever we want it. In these places we are public, not private.

Because of our online familiarity with each other, when we find ourselves face to face we don't waste time with the small talk, that's all out of the way. We dive straight into the meaningful, interesting, productive dialogue that enriches us, informs us, energizes us and challenges our creativity.

As a result, the people of this age are more creative, energized by ideas and opportunities, connected and, most importantly, collaborative. Research even shows that the more social people are online, the more social they are offline. That's a fact that many on the outside of social media will have a hard time understanding or even believing.

It's not a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of culture and perspective.

Small talk is so 1999. Wasting face to face time talking about what we had for lunch, what we think of the weather, who we saw walking down the street - these are true wastes of opportunity and relationship when we are together. This is what constituted most social interaction in the last century and now occupies a minimum of our conversations online today. This is what critics believe is so valuable and is being lost on the online folk. Seriously?

On twitter I sometimes share things of this nature in addition to sharing the most interesting experiences of my day, ideas, articles, perspectives, news, data, and opportunities. My relatively closed network on Facebook or my controlled circles on Google+ see my family photos, my interests, and the events I am attending. If you care to know me, it's there. No one is forcing you to read about my life but it enables you to know me better. Your daily news becomes the news from my life and the lives of the other people you know and have chosen to connect with.

The Dialogue That Builds a Society

Forget the period pieces of hillbillies and yokels; the pioneers of the 1800s built a society with confidence, aggression, vision, and tenacity and there is plenty of historical evidence that these pioneers said what needed to be said, did what needed to get done, and built the foundation for a middle class that fed our economy for the century that followed. I see the same traits emerging in the young people who have entered the workforce in recent years.

What the new generation knows is that the present and the future have a creative foundation and communication feeds that creativity. As these people mature in their careers, understand the sophistication of their professional relationships, and gain confidence in their abilities and experience, expect social media to grow even more crucial in bringing them together so they can make big things happen. They'll have the most powerful tool for collaboration humanity has ever known and the strength of character and perspective to use it in a powerful way.

I've learned a fair bit about how this dynamic plays out in business cultures and how we can plan for good outcomes. I'll hit on that next week...

[Video] GoPro Creates a New Entertainment Category for Their Target Market

I have a new pleasure: watching GoPro HD videos. What are they? They are videos shot using the GoPro HD video camera. And they are amazing!

So amazing that these videos are a new form of entertainment as well as an incredibly powerful weapon of marketing. I sit here glued to my laptop, unable to look away and miss another great adventure I had never even imagined before. All shot with the product the producers of the video are selling.

This is a fine example of amazing inbound marketing.

1. Create content that is extremely interesting for your target market and associate it with your brand.
2. Share it and engage directly with parties closest to your community.
3. Make it easy for fans to share.
4. Bonus for GoPro: Create your content using your own product.

Their camera is tiny, incredibly durable, waterproof, films in HD quality, and can be attached to a growing number of devices and helmets so it can capture unusual perspectives. Those are unique features that differentiate it from the competition. So they chose to use these cameras for some of the most extreme uses their fans could conjure to show their value through a unique entertainment product.

The people in their videos are the heroes of their target market. They are an irresistible draw for the people they want to sell their cameras to.

What content could you create that would be extremely interesting or useful for your target market?

Social Business Is Constantly Changing, And So Are We.

This week Sociallogical is rolling out several updates to the content of our online course, Understand Social Business, that includes Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and other developments over the last few months that have changed how we create and share content, build brand communities, and run companies.

• Pinterest introduces a new form of content curating that has become a useful tool for bringing new people into brand communities based on visual bookmarking and sharing that influences so many.
• Instagram is a new phenomenon in how we take and share photographs that has been a pleasure for so many iPhone users and is soon to arrive on the Android platform. It has caused amateur and professional photographers to reconsider their craft and how they attract new audiences to their work and we are happy to have renowned photographer Mark Hemmings give his views on Instagram to the course.
• Google+ is only nine months old this week but, with the release of a new feature every day, is having a profound impact on how we share content with each other as well as on how competitors such as Facebook rethink the future of their own platforms. Our lesson on Google+ include an update on how a business might consider involving this platform in their community strategy. It also includes new recommended links to how-to resources to help you make that happen.

There's a lot more that we have added, removed, and updated that you'll see in the course over the weekend. To keep up with the rapidly changing technology and cultural shifts that change how we grow companies, we're excited to bring this fresh perspective to the business teams who subscribe to our course to make the shift to social.

We want to help companies transform their cultures by helping their people understand the opportunities and goals of becoming a social business. What decisions have you made for your company this year to keep up and get ahead?

Social Envy? 6 Recommendations for Great Customer Service

Every day brand interactions occur that either draw customers into your community or send them running for the hills. Online social networks offer an opportunity to salvage small mistakes that leave big impressions, or add salt to wounds that starts a movement against your brand.

We all remember the infamous 'United Breaks Guitars' incident, where a dissatisfied customer wrote an unflattering song and video about United Airlines and, as of today, has close to 12 million viewers. The damage caused to the United brand by a relatively small, yet poor decision to throw a customer's guitar and fail to make amends is monumental and a lesson to us all.

The lesson that seems gets missed is that, in contrast, small interactions can become powerful hooks that draw people to your brand, building loyalty, respect and affection for your company and the people who work for you.

A Mini Case Study: A Social, Local Fashion Industry and One Bad Apple

Some businesses get it right and I want to draw attention to a few great businesses in my community who provide excellent service and online support for their women’s retail stores, and one that doesn’t. Following are 6 Recommendations to avoid a customer service crisis, using our great local shops as an example of the do’s, contrasted with the story of a recent interaction I had with a large chain store called Envy for the dont’s.

1. Let Employees Take Ownership of Your Community

I’m not a power shopper but I like to shop and consider it an important part of my social life. The local, independent stores listed below call me by name, ask me how my pregnancy is going, treat me as a friend, and chat with me online.

• Je Suis Prest never questions the nature of a return, knows my style, my size, my buying interests.
• Silver Daisy Designs, after getting to know me and trust my loyalty and appreciation for their products, has offered for me to take clothes from their store to wear at local events.
• Manchester Shoes asks me how my mother likes the boots she bought a few weeks ago and congratulated me on my pregnancy (which doesn’t show yet, by the way).
• Urban Shoe Myth, is another great boutique shop that brings in unique products based on an intimate, personal knowledge of their customers.
• Both Silver Daisy and Je Suis Prest take part in Saint John Cut (community photo shoots), in support of local artists and a growing fashion sector, among many other community-based fashion initiatives benefiting a variety of community charitable organizations.

Imagine seeing the same person at least once a month for more than 2 years and not caring to find out anything about that person, even their name. If the company you work for doesn’t reward this kind of curiosity, it is likely that you wouldn’t bother.

Last week I attempted to return a $50 sweater with receipt and tags attached to Envy and was told that they would need to contact “the head office on Monday” because I missed the return deadline. Yesterday they called to tell me that Envy would not be granting a return or exchange on the item...

2. Empower Your Employees To Build Relationships With Great Service

...Envy has been one of my favourite women's clothing stores. They employ kind, helpful, and knowledgeable staff who are a pleasure to visit on a day out shopping. What they don't employ are policies that let their staff give the same excellent service that their small, independent competitors do.

While Envy is in the business of selling clothes and making profits for their corporate head office through sales and visual branding, their smaller competitors are building community (and selling clothes and making profits) through respect, personal interactions and flexibility. I would be willing to bet that the great people who Envy employs in their store have a good sense of what great service is but are granted no decision-making power to execute...

3. Be Found Online

If a customer is not happy and they want to talk to you about it, be available so they talk to you before they complain to others. Your conversations with customers won’t always be happy interactions but you will always have the opportunity to show your respect, concern, and excellent service as you become part of the solution to their problems.

Every small local retailer I buy from has a social media presence that they watch and feed, through which I can contact them with any issues. Usually what I share with them are +1s, likes, and compliments for great service. But when customers do have a problem or leave a complaint, I can also see them providing solutions and keeping a friend, which keeps me too.

...After 15 minutes of searching for Envy online I located a Facebook account and posted my concern to their wall. Envy made their decision not to accept my return so I made my decision to share a simple post with friends and fellow shoppers on their Facebook account - which Envy chose to delete a short time later.

I learned that Envy, Samuel & Co. and Psuedio, all sister companies under the title of Sherlock Clothing Ltd., have a ‘head office’ with almost no connection to my community and all customer related decisions limited to Monday-Friday 8-4pm...

4. Respect Your Customer’s Network

It used to be that corporations had a voice and customers had nothing. Now consumer networks often rival your brand and usually command greater loyalty and credibility. Before you choose your response to a customer, know that you are talking to a partner, not a peon.

...Deleting my online complaint didn’t hide the issue. In this case, my message of poor customer service reached 8110 people (Facebook and Twitter combined) within 30 minutes. Envy’s reponse to an 8000+ audience was “Our return policy is written on the receipt, email our head office,” and soon after deleted the entire thread.

Guilty? Embarrassed? I get that. I also get that deleting customer complaints doesn’t hide or make the problem go away. Ignoring your customers is not as easy as it used to be...

5. Use Your Data To Know and Serve Your Customers

@kellylawson and we love to have you and help you my dear!! Even through the next 9 months ;)

— Kiera (@JeSuisPrest) March 23, 2012

The small independent retailers that I shop from use their information about my purchasing patterns to recommend products I might like and to welcome me as a friend with personal knowledge of my interests and big life events. They know that I don’t take advantage of their good will when the occasion arises that I wish to return a product. They also know I’ll be back when they do.

...Envy has been tracking my purchases since I started buying from them in 2003 by asking for my phone number every time I buy. They would know I started buying from them when I lived in Halifax, continued to shop there in Moncton, and was excited when the store came to Saint John a few years ago. They also know that this is the first time I have ever attempted to return anything to them and, admittedly, they would know that I have spent considerable money there year after year...

6. Invest in Communities, Not Just Promotions

For the local retailers I’ve mentioned, their goal is to build a community and social media is merely a tool to help with that. They have conversations with their customers, positive and negative, and behave with friendship toward the people they are in business to serve. This community is attractive to others and is what someone finds when they search online for retail stores in my city. They support local events and local businesses because being active participants of our community is also a part of their brand.

...I also posted my Envy issue to Twitter where a fantastic flurry of responses ensued that demonstrated to me that our local retailers have built a solid community - often shared with each other - around personal relationships, exceptional service, and responsiveness on social channels.

These retailers acknowledged interactions they have had with me and even their awareness that I am pregnant! How’s that for personal? To my knowledge, Envy/Samuel&Co was unaware that their potential community had been hijacked.

Our local retailers know me on a deeper level than Envy head office. They responded to my online posts about Envy as friends with support and concern, but not with disrespect to their competitors. In contrast, I didn’t hear a word on Twitter from Envy or its sister company Samuel&Co. Instead, their choice was to ignore me, delete our interaction, and keep my $50.

Deconstructing The Envy Service Failure

Perhaps the Envy/Samuel&Co/Pseudio empire is executing the same customer service model that has helped them to grow their clientele for decades, and are therefore unwilling to ‘fix what isn’t broken.’

However, the way customer service is delivered is changing all around them and consumers have an expectation that they will keep up with these changes in standard. If buyers like me have grown entitled to excellent, personal service it is because others have provided it to us.

The Sherlock Clothing Ltd. corporation has chosen to keep $50 in revenue at the cost of losing a loyal customer. I’m really not sure how they could have expected a different outcome if they understood what social business means to their profits. We care about being treated as human beings, with some appreciation that without our dollars, there is no business.

The Empires Are Making The Small Brands Shine

Perhaps it is because I am so well treated, listened to and engaged with by other local companies that I am even writing this blog today.

Social media has introduced two-way mass communication and has ushered in an era in which we expect social businesses to respond to us and treat us like our friends do.

Why on earth would I support a business that does not support me back, ignores my concerns, my fellow shoppers, its own employees, and my community? Why would I spend another dime in a place that is run by someone who sits by the phone miles away, dead to the world of social media, when my neighbours, my community members, my friends and retail owners are rolling out the red carpet for me every time I walk into their store? They listen to me, engage with me, and make my community a better place to live in.

Thank you to Envy for making this clear to me, and thank you to the $50 sweater that will go forever unworn. A constant reminder of the treasure we have in local, social retail.

Do you have a story of great (or not so great) customer service online? Tell us in the comments below.

Startups, Oatcakes, and Building Community Through Sales

There’s a new way to strategically connect with customers that gives certainty to sellers, reduced prices to consumers, and turns the process of social promotions into an addictive game that Groupon fell short on and fizzled.

Spinzo is a brilliant new startup that is now working with merchants in a way that actually helps them grow their business instead of gouging them. Started by our friend Emmanuel Elmajian, this new startup has launched with their bright new idea and a long list of features to come that will turn merchants into happy partners - quite the opposite experience many have had with Groupon and the like.

Case Study: The Cape Breton Oatcake Society

In the highlands of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia is a rich Scottish heritage complete with its own Gaelic College, Scotch Distillery (sorry, single malt whiskey), and countless kilt-wearing performers. And from this magical little piece of the world comes our friend, Greg Pringle, and his great grandmother’s mind-blowing recipe for the best oatcakes we have ever tasted.

Greg’s oatcake baking hobby turned into a little holiday season business in November 2011 when Greg decided to put a price on his wares and promote them to friends on Facebook by starting the Cape Breton Oatcake Society. Repeatedly selling out, Greg decided to explore this hobby as a long-term business idea in January 2012 and, after hearing what Emmanuel was up to with Spinzo, I introduced our two friends to each other to see how they might work together.

Today, after his première earlier this month, Greg launched his second Spinzo deal and we’re excited to see the early days of both businesses.

What This Means to Greg’s Business

Greg gets to show up at a specified place like a city market or other venue with a fully paid-for order of oatcakes. Distribution costs, waste, and uncertainty are all drastically reduced and his customers get a lower price.

How It Works

Greg creates a Spinzo deal with a starting price and shares it with his Oatcake Society members. Oatcake lovers give their credit card info through Spinzo and commit to the current price but know that the price they will pay at the end will decrease for every single additional buyer.

As lovers of the product, there is an incentive to spread the word and drive the price down (like I'm doing now. I'm in on this deal!). Every new convert is a new buyer and a new price-reducer for the other buyers.

There is no tipping point that triggers the discount. The sale happens, and the price just keeps getting lower with every new buyer.

Payment, Tracking, and Marketing Built In

Greg identified a few needs to grow his business that Spinzo could meet for him. He can now accept orders online, track orders to bake them when needed, and he gets added, exponential exposure to new customers through the personal networks of his buyers.

Understanding and Helping

It’s obvious from looking at the business model that Spinzo is flexible and genuinely eager to work with merchants. Their process now and as they scale focuses on significant effort up front to forge a partnership with their merchants instead of just selling a one-off deal.

They promote their “other” (non-Spinzo) deals on their Facebook page, their commissions are a lot lower (about 20% vs. 50% for many others), they are more open to featuring individual items, and they insist on profit for the merchant in every single deal.

Technology companies are famous for putting their innovations ahead of their customers. Many of them don’t even consider who might use their product or service until it is already built. When it comes to group buying and merchant-enabling, Spinzo is obsessed with making life better for merchants and their customers and making their own profits a function of their partner’s success.

Spinzo didn't start with a technology, it started by figuring out how to feed the growth of brand communities with a better buying model. And now a true society of oatcake lovers is born and bred.

A key part of a brand community built by focusing on a better buying experience, demonstrating how social business is more than just awareness and branding.

If you loved a product, would this kind of sales approach encourage you to share it with friends? Let us know in the comments.

[Video] Owning Your Own Message: 5 Lessons From The Obama Campaign Video

Battered by messages and mantras from the other side that aren’t always true and often wildly exaggerated, the incumbent candidate for the US Presidency responded this week by sharing his own message in his own way in a format that is entertaining, informative and, above all, sharable.

While the opposing Republicans would likely accuse the President of the same, his response to them is truly unique and, I’m sure we will learn over the next few weeks from polls, effective.

What’s also noteworthy is that he shared it first through an online news source that is extremely popular amoung his target demographic of supporters - the Huffington Post. By doing this, the people who are most likely to support him will be first to see it, share it, and distribute it, increasing the likelihood of a rapid organic spread of the video amoung an obvious, visible, massive group of supporters.

5 Lessons For Politicians and Businesses

The result is momentum and a direct feed into millions of personal networks in a way that a traditional campaign could never hope to reach. And through this one piece of political storytelling are a few lessons to apply to growing any community; political, business, or otherwise:

1. Be entertaining. More than any other nation, Americans vote for leaders who, above all,  make them feel proud to be an American and hopeful for their future as a nation. Content that feeds this need is captivating and entertaining to the President’s target audience and compels many to consume it. What motivates your community to take actions that support the growth of your company? Be entertaining by speaking to your audience in the language they know and respond to.
2. Be factual. My wife often jokes to “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”. But when millions have readily available tools to research the facts and the means to distribute them, you’ve got to make sure your claims stand up to this scrutiny. Was Obama advised to let the auto industry fail by his opponents? Yes he was. Did he ignore that advice and bail them out anyway, leading to their return to profits? Yes he did.
3. Be sharable. It seems so obvious but is so often missed. If you have valuable content you want shared with your supporters it needs to find its way to one-click consumption. Radio interviews that never get posted online or news stories locked behind paywalls are useless to a candidate (and a business) who wants the message spread widely online. Find a way around it or reconsider how much time you are willing to invest in that kind of exposure if you agree with the research that the most influential audience is online.
4. Be personal. In his recent video, some of the most poignant moments hit home when the President shared what is important to him about the events and decisions he’s made, on a personal, emotional level that people can connect with. He brings us in to what motivates him, what he cares about, and what human qualities a voter can identify with and want to see in a person who represents them. Machines follow orders, people make decisions, and it’s important to know the human qualities that make those decisions.
5. Be consumable. Be honest, how many lengthy articles do you read in the run of a week? If you hope to convert voters into supporters, don’t count on many of them to read through your lengthy campaign platform. By all means, write that lengthy manifesto for those who do, but make sure that every part can be broken down into a bite-sized, sharable nugget to pass around and discuss throughout the timeline of the campaign. Not everyone will care about everything you do. Make sure they can rally around and amplify the parts they care about most.

What These Lessons Mean For Business

Read through the bolded lines of the 5 points above and consider which ones do not apply to your business and the community you hope to build around it. In my opinion, they all apply. And if you add the social lessons we have shared since this blog was born, the content you create will feed a wonderful community that brings a lot of value to the people who like you.

Political campaigns are big business and there are many pundits around the world who have dissected the process of winning in great detail. There’s a lot to read and a lot to learn. But the basics of building great content that draws people to you and turns them into supporters are simple and straightforward and, surprisingly, still lost on many businesses.

As you watch the political campaigns unfold in your part of the world, consider what resonates with you. What draws you in, what content compels you to share, and what is so meaningful that you’re willing to speak out?

Learn from it, copy it, and use it for your business. And please share your observations in the comments below.

Social Business: Knowing Where To Start

"When you walk into a room full of people, what’s the first thing you do? For me, my goal is to find people I might know and just say hello.  Yet, when it comes to social media, most businesses still don’t see social networks as a place to socialize but as mediums to broadcast, which is a very big and costly mistake. Some businesses even forget that social is about connecting with people. Many, determined to continue operating as they always have, shove their ad messages through social mediums that eventually end up detesting them.

So how can businesses avoid making the costly mistakes mentioned above? Here are two key principles to starting off right..."

Above is an excerpt from a guest post I wrote yesterday for my friend Dave Gallant's blog.

Dave is an eastern Canadian social business consultant who understands the "social" side of social business more than most and emphasizes it well in what he does. Dave is also working on a new startup called Recommendur that focuses on helping people get started using social media in the early days when people are often unsure of what their first steps should be.

My guest post speaks to the people Dave hopes to help with Recommendur. Dave's interest in helping people learn social media, especially in a business context makes his new startup a likely partner for Sociallogical and we're looking forward to seeing what he builds.

What advice do you have to give someone just getting started in social business?

Understand Social Business with Elaine Shannon

Register using code ELAINES to join "the Empress of Inspiration", Elaine Shannon, in her first course to help your team understand social business in a few short weeks as Sociallogical's newest mentor of our online classes.

"Still working on Sociallogical course. REALLY good content! Should help me become more social media savvy! Thanks a bunch for a great course!" - Lorna Pond, Urban Landscaping

"Almost halfway through chapter three of Sociallogical course! Tres enlightening! 2012 will be a year of connectiveness for HHP" - Greg Hemmings, Hemmings House Productions

Elaine is scheduling her inaugural class to begin in 2 weeks with registration closing on Friday, March 16 as her last step for certification as a Sociallogical Mentor.

• 10 person class limit, first come, first served.
• Visit Sociallogical Learn to find out more and to register using the code: ELAINES
• Registration deadline is Friday, March 16, 2012.
• Live class discussions will be on Sunday evenings, April 1, 8, and 15.
• Elaine will be co-mentoring this first class with Jeff Roach.
• As always, students will have access to course materials for a full year.

Chapter 1: How Did We Get Here? How Do I Start?

Chapter 2: How To Use the Social Media Tool Box

Chapter 3: How to Grow a Social Business

Full course details

3 Basic Steps To Make Your Business the Core of Your Community (And Why You Should)

The people who work for your company need to be the core of your community, online and off, if you hope to build a community around your brand that draws people to you.

As a business, you are all together to build something you believe in. You work with people who you have something so in common with that you spend 40+ hours a week together doing it.

When people look for you online, what they need to find is your community, sharing and amplifying each other's content and talking with each other, like friends and colleagues do. Your social media community is the heavy lifter of your inbound marketing strategy. Trying to draw people to your brand without it is as unlikely to succeed as not advertising was back in business 1.0.

Here’s the basic Sociallogical prescription for building a brand community:

1. Get your team online. Make sure they understand what social business is and how crucial it is to the future success of your business.
2. Decide together, the staff and leaders of your business, how you are going to operate as your own community, publicly online for all to see and interact with.
3. Build a community strategy that relies on the foundation of your own people socializing online with each other, with their own personal networks and activities.

This active community you build with your first line of stakeholders is the best social asset you have available to you. If you don’t socialize with each other, why would anyone else want to?

NOTE: The Photo above is the Hemmings House team, who we had the privelege of working with this year. A fantastic small company that is an attractive core for a growing and engaging community for their brand.

Training Wheels: How I Introduced My 10 Year Old to Social Media and Why

For  one  very important reason, Google+ is the social network that a huge number of families are about to discover as a safe place to introduce their kids to social media.

Why do I believe this? I'm a parent and I know many more like me who have reservations about social media at a young age for a variety of reasons. We are a huge untapped market of families who are keeping our kids off of social networks, reluctant to introduce an accelerant to our kid's socialization. We have a sense that building the foundation for healthy relationships isn't rushed and the best learning environment is small with controls on how it grows.

We are parents, after all. It's our role to mentor our children into adulthood and we all know now that social networks are a big part of their future.

How I Introduced My 10 Year Old to Google+ and Why

My kids are on Spring Break this week and today my daughter and I set her up on Google+. She has asked for access to Facebook for years now and I have refused and continue to refuse her request. She said her friends are all on and sharing things with each other constantly. That's why I'm concerned.

Instead, we opted to break the age rules and created a Google+ account. Then we landed on 3 circles:

1. Family - any and all family members (3 generations)
2. The Lawson-Roaches - Just our immediate family that sleeps under our roof
3. Following - brands and celebrities she wants to hear from

We deleted the 'Friends' and 'Acquaintances' circles that are set up by default. The rule is that, until she is 13, she adds no one to any circle without my permission. She and I will regularly sit down together and look at the brands and celebrities she has found that she likes and we'll check if the content they are sharing is good for her and why before adding them to her "Following" circle.

Our Family Only Policy

The nature of Google+ is much different from Facebook because it makes choosing who to share content with a required decision to make at the time of posting. While Facebook presents clumsy options that few users know anything about, Google+ doesn't share anything with anyone unless a person or predetermined group (circle) is selected. These "circles" need to be carefully considered beforehand so that when we have something to share we give thought to WHO we want to share it with and circles make it easy to make that choice.

There is a detachment that I see many kids (and adults, for that matter) developing when it comes to online activity. In the same way that a driver's behaviour and sense of respect, responsibility, and civility is often greatly decreased when they get behind a wheel, relating to others online can also breed a similar regard for others that is unhealthy and unwanted.

By keeping a family only policy for the first few years, the respect and high regard she has for her family will hopefully frame how she learns to socialize online by socializing first with them.  When she is eventually unleashed on peer groups and, later, people she works with and meets in her travels, this respect and responsible approach will hopefully be preserved.

As my wife has pointed out, online sharing appears to be an important tool for kids to express themselves. Social networks allow kids to discover who they are by expressing what they care about most. These expressions are played back to them in an accepted medium that is the television of their times. How might we have perceived ourselves if we saw our lives played out on TV as kids?

This is incredibly powerful! Kids need to be mentored into responsible and thoughtful use of social media, not thrown into the playground to figure it out themselves. This is a blind spot for many parents who are looking for a solution.

Characteristics of Conscientious Parents

Because social networking is a blind spot for most parents, the conscientious ones are cautious and careful. The deserved Google+ reputation as a platform that gives users more control over who sees what they share is slowly being discovered by this group of parents and the word will spread.

The same parents who buy organic foods, try to make ethical purchasing and investing decisions, recycle, pay attention to safety warnings, and study family vacation choices are likely to share a concern for how their kids learn social networking and I believe many of them will turn to Google+ first.

A Network Still Growing at a Manageable Pace

Google+ is less than a year old with 50 million regular users. Facebook is over 6 years old with over 800 million users. For careful consumers and children, this presents an opportunity to grow slowly with this network that, unless you believe Google is on the decline, is going to grow and become mainstream, likely in 2013 or 2014.

Be there first and use the advantages of this network to be social with your audience. The obstacles to broadcasting and advertising on this channel will do us all some good.

Are you on Google+ or do you plan to be soon?

3 Reasons Why Social Media Is Here To Stay

There is constant change in how we communicate and the players we have now - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - may not look like they do today for very long. But social media is a permanent fixture of the modern world and I'll tell you why I'm confident of this.

1. Ubiquitous Broadband

Big words that mean: high-speed internet is everywhere, including our pockets, and available to most of us. If we were still on dialup to connect to the internet then social media would be clumsy, sluggish, and few would want to use it. But, instead, most of us can have broadband and do. And it makes the networks and media available to us fast and powerful.

And it's only going to get faster, broader, and more mobile. The mobile speeds we are about to see in the next few years make even the fastest connections now available in the home pale in comparison. Soon there will be almost no delay between asking for something and getting it no matter where we find ourselves in the western world.

Unless broadband goes away, social media is here to stay.

2. Dirt Cheap Storage

Do you remember when storage was an issue? Do you remember what online storage even is? When I left university in the mid 1990s my laptop was able to hold less information than my Gmail account will now allow me to send in one email. The size of our hard drives were among the most important considerations when buying a new computer and just 15 years ago were commonly measured in units 1/1000000 of what we measure them in now.

Storage is so cheap now that it is a non-issue in the purchase of a new computer for most people and is being given away for free by the gigabyte. Google gives us over 7GB of storage for free - an amount I still have not yet been able to fill after over 10 years with my current Gmail account. Dropbox gives us 2 GB of free storage and many others do the same.

Have you ever paid YouTube to store and stream one of your home videos? Has last.fm or grooveshark.com dinged you because you downloaded or streamed too much data from their music servers? Storage used to be a barrier to using various forms of media and it's just not anymore. And since much of what we do on social media is share media, the limitlessness of storage is a big enabler.

Unless cheap storage goes away, social media is here to stay.

3. Superb Usability

Do you know why your parents and your kids use social media? Because they can. We used to argue about the challenges of building websites and user interfaces that people will use without confusion and frustration but that doesn't happen so much anymore. Some interfaces are better than others but we have learned a tremendous amount about what works and what doesn't in engaging users and making things easy and we're not likely to unlearn these skills anytime soon.

Facebook ate MySpace's lunch largely because it was more usable and intuitive. Twitter exploded into the mainstream because it is simple-simple and takes most people about 15 minutes to figure out (sure, it takes months for most to be comfortable with it but that's a cultural issue, not a usability one).

Unless we forget everything we've learned about how to build great human interfaces, social media is here to stay.

Social Business Is Also Here To Stay

The telephone found an important place in our business world and became an indispensable tool that connects people inside companies and with their customers and partners. Try to imagine dealing with a business that withholds the use of the telephone from its employees and refuses to give a phone number where you can reach them. I'm confident most people would refuse to do business with them.

And this will become the fate for any business who responds in a similar way to social media and their customers who demand to be served through it.

It won't happen overnight. In the early days of the telephone some businesses DID withhold the telephone from employees and considered it a distraction, not an enabler. So businesses can be forgiven for choosing a fear-based response to this new phenomenon in these early days.

But eventually consumers will only connect with businesses who are truly connecting. Talented people will only consider working for open, connected, and social corporations. Investors will only put their dollars in leadership and cultures that know how to build communities that show support with dollars and their networks.

Choose what changes you will make and when for your business. But do not make the mistake of hoping social business will go away. It won't. And based on the tremendous opportunities and benefits it provides us all, once we get past the culture shock and fear, no one should hope it does.

Am I overconfident in my prediction? Tell me how your business is making the shift or why you're not in the comments below.