Year: 2010

Are you thanking your customers, or exploiting them?

Dave

When a telemarketer calls from a company I do business with, I’m more likely to listen to at least the start of their pitch, because I already have a relationship with them and maybe they’re calling with something relevant or important. Companies know that and take advantage of it.

A lot of those calls start off like this:

“We’d like to thank you for being a valued customer.”

Well, that’s nice. You’re welcome. Is that all?

No, that’s not all. What inevitably follows is something like, “… by giving you the opportunity to buy this other product or service from us.”

Oh, so you’re not really calling to thank me for being a valued customer, are you? You’re exploiting our existing business relationship to try to sell me something else.

Funny, I don’t feel so valued anymore. I just feel like somebody who gets an extra sentence added to the front of your script.

I had a great call with Zena Weist recently, a lovely human being and one of the first people I met in social media. Zena is now director of social media at H&R Block. We talked about their Get It Right initiative for my upcoming book, The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy.

The whole point of the Get It Right community and the activities surrounding it is to answer people’s tax questions and use their expertise to help people. Their stated purpose in creating the community is customer retention, which, when you think about it, is bizspeak for “thanking our customers.” “And, brilliantly, they will answer anyone’s questions. They don’t ask whether or not you’re an H&R Block customer.”

How much more meaningfully can you say “thank you” than by being there to help at tax time?

Think about what you’re giving your customers who have chosen to follow you on Twitter, read your blog or “like” you on Facebook. Are you sharing content, information and assistance that makes their lives better? Is anything you offer online going to make it easier for someone to sleep better at night?

Are you really thanking them for being your customer and giving them something of value? Or are you exploiting the relationship to sell to them?

If you want to say thank you, say thank you. If you want to say, “Thank you, and…” make the “and” something your customers want, not something you want.

photo by SOCIALisBETTER

Helicopters and bad news

Dave

I’m working at home today, having returned to meet the HVAC guy and finding out we need a new air conditioner. I was upstairs “since the upstairs AC unit is still okay, touch wood” and kept hearing what sounded like helicopters overhead. I went outside to look but didn’t see any.

After a while I was sure I heard one, then it sounded like two or more. I asked a question on Facebook and Twitter: “Okay, at the risk of sounding like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, why have I been hearing a helicopter in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area for the last hour or more? It’s almost never a good sign.”

I assumed it would be bad news. The only time a hovering helicopter is welcome, in my experience, is when UNC wins the NCAA championship.

Several folks responded right away to let me know what I could have found with a news search, that a light plane had crashed at Horace Williams Airport, not too far from where we live. Sadly, the news is reporting that one person was killed and two injured. One of the passengers is the brother of the American killed in the recent bombing in Uganda that targeted viewers of the World Cup final. He was flying home to be with his family. Thankfully, from what I can tell, he’s okay.

I’m sitting here in my bedroom now, listening to what sounds like several news helicopters, flying back and forth, no doubt broadcasting the same image of a crumpled airplane.

In 1995, a UNC law student named Wendell Williamson shot and killed two people near downtown Chapel Hill, UNC sophomore and lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt and Chapel Hill resident Ralph W. Walker, Jr. He also shot and injured two other people, including a young Chapel Hill police officer who was shot through the open window of her car as she rushed to the scene. As this 1999 article in Time points out, everybody who was in Chapel Hill at the time has a memory of that event. I had two friends who were downtown at the time and hid from the shootings in a parking garage. Another said Williamson shot at him and missed.

I was in Durham during the shootings. I don’t remember why, but I know it was after I had started working for myself because I had my first cell phone. I was driving back into Chapel Hill when my mother called. “Don’t worry,” she said, “your father is fine.” Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about because I hadn’t heard the news. My dad worked at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time, having retired from Nortel and taken an associate dean position at the School of Education.

I called and talked to him, then I pulled the car over, turned on the radio news and was overwhelmed by a deep sadness. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill since 1989. We moved around a lot when I was young, and Chapel Hill quickly felt like home when I moved here and took a job at The Chapel Hill News. Inside a year I knew lots of people, from the mayor to the door guy at The Cat’s Cradle to bank presidents and bartenders and musicians and town council members and business owners.

It turns out I probably also knew Williamson, as he and I were both regulars at the Hardback Cafe. I don’t really remember him, possibly because I was usually there in the evenings and he was a daytime regular.

Everybody says the same thing in the aftermath of senseless violence, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen here. If you’ve ever been to Chapel Hill, it’s a fairly typical, picturesque college town. When it gets mentioned in books, it’s usually called “leafy” or “sleepy.” It’s grown a lot in the 21 years that I’ve lived here, but it’s still a pretty laid-back and friendly place. The kind of place where tragedy feels more personal.

My apartment was near downtown. I found out later that Williamson had parked his car in the lot of the adjacent apartments, and walked into town via the same route I used. Sitting on the couch watching the news, I could see the helicopters outside my window. They would hover there, motionless, for as long as they could, then zoom off abruptly to refuel. Then they would come back. That went on for a long time; in my memory they were there for hours.

I remember wanting to shout at them to go away. The longer they hovered there, the more ghoulish, inhuman and robotic they began to look, like mechanized vultures.

That’s what I’m thinking of now, as the helicopters hover outside my window again. I can’t quite see them through the trees, except when they climb to get a different view, or, I assume, leave to refuel. I suppose they’ll be there through the evening news broadcasts, and we’ll be eating dinner to the sound of rotor blades.

Some milestones come sooner than you’re ready

Dave

This morning, The Boy woke up and started calling for us, the way he usually does. The Mrs and I were in the middle of our slowly-returning-to-the-land-of-the-living rituals when we heard a thump, followed by the unmistakable pitter patter of little feet.

Conrad came running in to the bathroom and slid to a stop, Roadrunner-style, grinning at us with a look that said, “I know I’m probably not supposed to be here, what with having climbed out of the thing you put me in at night that is clearly intended to contain me, but still, you have to admit, it’s pretty cool.”

It was hard to get mad at him, seeing how proud he was of himself. We had a brief, half-hearted discussion about staying in his crib until Mommy or Daddy came to get him. I’ll let you know tomorrow how effective it was.

Promoting your local business through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube

Dave

In my last post I mentioned I had sent a friend a long email in answer to her questions about using social media to promote her orthodontia practice. I talked about the difference between spamming your friends and promoting your business. In the second part of the email, I gave her some specific tips for integrating all the social media channels.

Here’s a quick blueprint for what I would do if I were starting a small, service-oriented local business:

Try to give your business a unique name that you can own in Google search results, that has the URL available, that you can get as a user name on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. All of that will make you more searchable. Think about how people might be searching Google to find an orthodontist.

There’s a white truck I’ve seen driving around town. On one side it says chapelhillelectrician.com. On the other, carrboroelectrician.com. There’s a small business owner who understands search engine optimization.

Once you’ve picked a business name that you think you can own:

1. Buy the URL from someplace like GoDaddy or Network Solutions. Once you buy the URL, you can point it wherever you want, like to a blog or your business’ website, “although these days there is less and less difference between the two“.

2. Set up a blog at WordPress.com. Write about who you are and why you’re starting the practice. Try to post something useful and interesting at least once a week. If you read a great article somewhere that answers a question a patient might have, write up a quick post about why you think it’s interesting and then link to the article you read. You don’t have to write something original, long and thoughtful every time, as long as you’re frequently sharing things of value.

3. Set up a Facebook page for your practice. Let all your friends know you’ve started the page. Use your personal Facebook account to let people know you’ve created the business page, but only mention it occasionally. Let people decide if they want to follow the professional you; don’t force it into your personal stream.

But don’t shy away from mentioning what you’re doing at work. When you open the practice or have milestones, share them in your personal stream if you want. That’s what I do. I don’t talk about SAS all the time, but I do link my SAS blog and mention big happenings, because that’s part of the totality of who I am.

Link your blog to your Facebook business page, so that when you post on your blog, it’s shared on your Facebook page as well. You can do that through the Facebook Notes feature, but I find the Networked Blogs Facebook app works better.

3. Create a Flickr account for your business. Maybe your patients will let you take pictures of them and post them there. “You’ll have to feel that out. No idea if that runs afoul of HIPAA. Also, a lot of your patients are likely to be minors and then you’d need parental permission.”

Link your Flickr account to your Facebook page as well, and promote it on your blog.

4. Create a YouTube channel for your business. Buy a small handheld video camera like a Flip or Kodak Zi-8. Shoot a video of yourself talking about who you are and why you became an orthodontist. Shoot videos that explain procedures, or answer questions people have. I’ll bet if you made a video called “Top Ten Misconceptions People Have About Orthodontists” and put it up on YouTube, you’d get lots of hits.

Link your YouTube channel to your Facebook page, and embed the videos as posts on your blog.

When you post blog posts, videos or photos, include key words in the description and tags like “orthodontia,” “orthodontist,” “braces,” “Chapel Hill,” “Carrboro,” etc. That will make it more likely people will find them in a search.

4. Create a Twitter account for your business. Use the Twitter account to promote your blog posts, videos and photos. But more important, use it to share information about orthodontia that people will find useful, as I described above.

Search Twitter for all the important keywords and see who is talking about those topics. Follow them, and the people they follow. See if there are any Twitter lists devoted to your field.

Use a tool like Tweetdeck that will allow you to set up search columns. You could set up columns for search terms like “Chapel Hill orthodontist,” and you’d see if someone tweeted, “Does anybody know a good orthodontist in Chapel Hill?” You could respond and say, “I’m a Chapel Hill orthodontist. What questions can I answer?”

You can also set up Google Alerts for all those keywords as well, and you’ll get an email notification from Google whenever anybody talks about them.

Lots to think about. You wouldn’t have to do all these things at once, or all of them at all. In order of value I would suggest:

1. A blog
2. A Facebook page
3. A Twitter account

Set up all three of those and get them integrated, then think about adding other channels.

For even more information about using social media to promote your business, big or small, I highly recommend the Marketing Over Coffee website and podcast. They have these connections — especially local search — down to a science.

And for more specifics about Facebook marketing, my friend Justin Levy wrote the book.

photo by ShieldConnectors

The difference between spamming friends and promoting your business

Dave

I’ve had an interesting back-and-forth via Facebook email with an old friend who is starting an orthodontia practice. I had complained in my Facebook status about my friends “some of whom, in the peculiar world of Facebook, I don’t actually know” who only seem to use Facebook to promote their band or their book or their business.

Some of that is perfectly fine, and when The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy is published, it’s for damn skippy I’ll be talking about it everywhere. It’s a part of me and what I’m doing, but it’s never going to be all of me or all of what I’m doing.

So where do you draw the line? How do you promote your business via social media in a way that won’t get you unfriended? Here’s what I wrote to my friend in response to that question.

The ones who annoy me are the people who I know as people, who friended me as people, and then never share anything about themselves. All they do is talk about their next gig or their business. The worst iteration of that is when they use Facebook email to send me emails about their shows and upcoming events.

In other words, when I signed up to be friends with Joe Blow, I did it because I know him and like him and am interested in his life. I didn’t do it because I wanted to get reminders three times a week on my wall and in my inbox that his band The Puffy Sleeves is playing in Greenville. When all you get is the business and none of the personal, it feels like bait-and-switch.

There’s a book by Jim Tobin from Ignite Social Media called Social Media is a Cocktail Party. The thesis is you don’t walk into a cocktail party and immediately start telling people about yourself and what you sell. You make a connection first, and if it’s appropriate to the conversation down the road, you might mention what you sell.

The right way to use Facebook to let people know about your band or your book or your business, in my opinion, is to create a Facebook page for that entity, then people have the option to “like” that page. When they choose to “like” it, they are opting in to receive messages in their Facebook stream. It’s clear what the purpose is and what kind of information they will be getting.

If you start a page for your orthodontia practice, think about what you can do to make it fun and informative. People have all kinds of questions, concerns, doubts and fears about orthodontia. What could you do to help them understand the big questions, get the right information to make better decisions, and show them that yours is a practice where they would feel welcome and maybe even have some fun?

photo by BarelyFitz

When does “TGIF” sound like “I hate my job”?

Dave

It’s the Friday before the July 4th weekend. I’ve taken a week’s vacation to work on my book “a task from which I am now procrastinating by writing a blog post”, so I’ve been acutely aware of how quickly this week has passed. It reminds me once again that the perception of time’s passage is completely dependent on what you’re doing.

Decades ago I worked behind “the jump in a pub on the King’s Road in London. Two hours tending bar on a sleepy Sunday watching the antiques store crowd wander through and turn their noses up at our wine selection passed much more slowly than two hours frantically pulling pints for hundreds of Chelsea hooligans supporters packed shoulder to shoulder and trying to get bevvied up before the match.

Time passes more quickly when you’re busy, yes. But also, nobody ever complains about time passing slowly when they’re enjoying what they’re doing. This week has felt no longer than two or three days, because I’m thoroughly enjoying writing this book, and it’s hard to find time in a regular week to devote to it. So you’re not going to hear me say, “Thank God it’s Friday today, because I wish it was Monday again.

Every Friday, I see some of my Facebook friends saying “TGIF” On Wednesdays they celebrate Hump Day. Some get an early start bemoaning Monday on Sunday afternoon. Many post things like, “I’m really looking forward to the long holiday weekend with my family” or “Happy Friday, everybody” Posts like that sound positive and friendly.

Others post things like, “I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday. Will this week never end? It’s a small difference in semantics, but a big difference in perception.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve had plenty of Fridays that felt like they took a month to arrive. We’ve all had busy weeks we were glad to see the back of. If you use your social media channels to share with friends who know and love you, then a post complaining about your tough week will likely draw an empathetic digital pat on the back.

But what if you use social media professionally? What are you saying to your boss or your colleagues? What about your clients? If your first response to that question is, “I don’t care, I should be able to say whatever I want” then go ahead and stop reading now and best of luck in the future.

Those of us who are active in these channels put so much out there about our lives, and some of us tend to do it without thinking of the overall picture it paints. I’m talking about more than just the standard warnings against posting party pictures to Facebook or saying you think your boss is an idiot.

What does the totality of your social media presence say about you, as a professional? It’s possible your next boss will Google you before she even looks at your resume. What’s she going to think if the first thing she reads says, “God, I’m glad that week from hell is over?

I’m aware this may sound contradictory to my oft-stated belief that social media is helping us all be more human in positive ways. I know people get tired of work sometimes. I get tired of work sometimes. Everybody gets tired of work sometimes.

But why lead off with it?

photo by Brendan Adkins