3 Ways Tradespeople Can Use Social Media To Boost Credibility and Business

I’m always trying to give manufacturers ideas on how to reach the professional tradesman by using social media. I’ve asked a friend of mine and fellow B-to-B  blogger Nicky Jameson to offer her comments and insights on how the tradespeople can utilize social to build their business. I think you will enjoy her comments in this 2-part series. Enjoy.

Many tradespeople feel they don’t really need to have anything to do with social media. Perhaps because their business comes mostly through referrals, or they don’t see immediate value in social media, or they feel it may take up too much time and they need to be out getting new business. And many tradespeople feel intimidated by social media.

Getting business is important and should never take a back seat to your marketing activities. Social media tools are exactly that – tools. However social media is an opportunity you don’t want to miss because it can actually help you target local business more effectively. More importantly, it can help establish you as a trusted person to do business with. Trust, engagement and relationships are the building blocks of business – and social media.

If you’re a tradesperson, you rely on word of mouth to spread the word about your business and services. Did you know social media can help you take this to a new level?

Here are 3 ways Tradespeople can use social media to benefit their customers and business:

1. Use social media to establish trust with consumers

Did you know that one of the top concerns consumers have with regard to allowing tradespeople into their homes is trust? Put yourselves in your customer’s shoes for a moment. As a customer, you’re alone in an emergency. You need a plumber or an electrician… or another tradesperson to fix something you can’t do yourself. You’ve never met the tradesperson, yet there you are about to let a complete stranger into your home for an unspecified time. Most people are uncomfortable about allowing strangers into their homes at any time and they usually have no way of knowing who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.

According to Hattie Hasan of UK plumbing company Stopcocks, trust has never been more important and consumers are becoming increasingly cautious when hiring tradespeople. They also want to ensure they spend their money wisely… on jobs well done.

When you join a social network that operates on a trust basis with other tradespeople, it helps you establish trust with consumers. When they search for you online and see you are in a trust-based social network, it helps build confidence in potential customers.

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7 Ideas For Social Media And Business

Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent has invited me to contribute to a string of posts dedicated to businesses measuring the ROI and success from social media efforts. If you haven’t already you should check out Valeria’s site - I think much of my audience would find her content very useful and engaging!

I’ve been asked my thoughts on companies measuring social media efforts many times. In fact, I’ve gone through the process of justifying the effort and definitely have a strong opinion. If you’re a marketing manager wanting to jump into social media, but your superiors are hesitant to give budget for the effort, you really need to think out how to position the medium.

I don’t think you can put a dollar figure on social media to prove ROI. You’ll have a hard time showing what the revenue increases were from your blogging or other social media efforts. The medium has not advanced far enough for that. I also don’t think that the medium is wide-spread enough that you can justify ROI with only subscriber count and number of comments. Many senior executives wouldn’t know what an RSS subscriber even means.

With that said, I think this is a very viable form of corporate marketing and there are a number of ways the medium can be sold up the chain and measured throughout the year:

• Don’t Isolate Social Media: Position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

• Sales Tool: When is the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a social media medium could be considered along the same lines. With every piece of content we create for our company blog, we make sure our sales people are aware they can share that content with interested customers. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

• Feedback: We’re also finding success in using blogging as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your products. We’ve already received valuable feedback that rivals that of an individual order placed.

• Promote Realistic Expectations: I think many marketers who are into social media and blogging are a bit misguided as to the affect blogging will have on marketing efforts. In the marketing blog community, you can start a blog, link out to 50 other bloggers in your first week and pick up traffic and subscribers that are fun to measure. Not all niches have that opportunity. Many communities lack a large enough niche in which to socialize. What then? I encourage people in less sociable niches not to pump the benefits of thousands of subscribers, millions of page views, or hundreds of comments. It could take years to develop that following in some online communities as the medium matures. Focus less on expected statistics and more on how social media will be integrated with the rest of your product marketing efforts.

• Multipurpose Content: As a small business marketing manager, it’s always music to my ears when someone says that we can use content we’ve created for multiple purposes. If you’re blogging, you should be creating valuable content. Have you thought about using portions of that content for an eNewsletter creation or the beginning of a white paper? Make sure you have a plan to have multiple purposes for your efforts.

• Go Find Your Customer: One easy case I was able to make for blogging was the ability for our company to more easily go meet our audience where they begin most online searches that lead to our website - Google. Most of our website traffic originates on Google so it only makes sense for us to continue our efforts to get in their search results. Blogging platforms are very solid ways to optimize content for search engines - especially if you’re updating often and using the right methods.

• Stats: I know, I know - stats are important. I just didn’t want them to be the focus of this post because not all social media efforts should be measured with analytics. Believe me, I do follow our stats, but I pay more attention to subscribers, comments, and from where the visits originate. These are important statistics to gauge how well your audience is receiving your content.

In two years, I’ll guarantee that there will be measurements in place that prove ROI from businesses engaging in social media. This method of conversing with your audience is growing by the day. But right now we need to focus on social media as a tool in our marketing toolbox that supports all the other tools we’re using in our marketing plans.

I’m supposed to tag some people to also contribute to this conversation, but there are so many people I’d like to hear from that I don’t know where I’d begin. For starters I’d like to see what Marty, Matt, Pat and Stoney have to say. But, if you have opinions and want to chime in, please do - and send me the link to your post and I’ll add it this one.

Reader Responses:

• Measuring ROI on social media investments (Francois Gossieaux - Emergence Marketing)
• Social Media Measurement (Tom O’Brien - A Human Voice)

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How Social Media is Changing the 2010 Grammys

How Social Media is Changing the 2010 Grammys

On Sunday January 31, 2010, the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards will air live on CBS. Mashable founder Pete Cashmore will be at the ceremony (lucky dog!) but even for those of us watching at home, the Recording Academy has taken great strides to make this year’s ceremony more interactive and fan-centric than ever before.

The Academy has also embraced social media for the 2010 Grammys, big time. We had a chance to talk to the RA about the move toward social media, the challenges associated with the transition and the response from the fans, artists and other Academy members.

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Why Social Media, Why Now

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The Recording Academy — which was founded in 1957 and is dedicated to improving the quality of life and the cultural condition for music and the people who make it — is your typical well established organization that is reticent to change. For instance, an award for Best Rap Album wasn’t even added to the Grammy ceremony until 1996 (a Best Rap Performance award was first issued in 1989, the Academy’s first official recognition of the genre). If it can take that long to fully recognize one of the most popular music genres (Best Rap Song wasn’t awarded until 2004), you can imagine how difficult it would be for the organization to embrace social media.

Social media introduces an entire paradigm shift into how the Academy can both connect with music lovers and with how its message is consumed and presented. That said, the Academy is aware that the paradigm shift is happening, not just to the industry, but to our culture as a whole. In order to stay relevant and connected, the Academy would have to embrace this new way of communicating. I spoke with Evan Greene, the Chief Marketing Officer of the Recording Academy about how the Grammys are embracing social media this year and how and why that decision was made.

Evan told me that the Academy established a social media task force in 2008 and did a lot of outreach in 2009, basically assessing the climate, the places where the fans were spending their time, and evaluating the decision to jump in full force. Evan made it very clear that the Academy didn’t want to just haphazardly get involved, if the organization was going to do social media, it was going to do it correctly.

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Biggest Challenges

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When I asked Evan what the most challenging aspect of adopting a social media strategy was, he told me that it was making the decision to actually embrace social media at all. He explained that the Academy has always tried to manage and keep very careful control over its message and brand. By embracing social media, that means giving up that control. Because while the Academy can connect directly with fans, fans can also connect back. That means accepting criticism and engaging in a discussion in a public way, something that just isn’t the norm for the Academy.

I was struck by just how common this fear is, not just with older and more established brands, but even with smaller and newer companies. Social media does inherently mean that you are giving up the ability to centrally control the message. However, what is interesting is that the companies that embrace and accept that grain of truth are usually those that are most successful with social media.

After making the decision to fully engage, Grammy.com was completely rebuilt and official presences were made on Twitter (@theGrammys), Facebook () and YouTube (). Interaction and fan-generated content from these platforms and others all contributed to what has become the centerpiece for the Grammys 2010 campaign: We’re All Fans.

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We’re All Fans

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Fans are the core of popular music. And unlike industry executives (and sometimes even the artists themselves), fans are often the first to embrace new technologies and social networks to share and remix content by their favorites artists. So with that in mind, TBWAChiatDay, the agency of record for the Grammy awards, created a multi-format multimedia campaign related to Grammy-nominated artists, curated entirely from fan-generated content.

If you visit WereAllFans.com, you’ll see portraits of some of the nominated artists composed entirely of real-time content from Twitter (), Flickr (), Facebook and YouTube. The content is refreshed and fed in and users can click on aspects of the content to view or play it back all on the page. It’s a pretty cool way to show stuff off.

Also cool is the television campaign for We’re All Fans. Comprised of YouTube performances that real fans made covering the nominated artist’s song. Not only is it a cool visualization of the campaign, but for the fans that made those videos themselves, it must be amazing to see something you made and created airing on CBS and on the Internet for the whole world to see. To be clear, these weren’t performances done specifically for an advertising spot, this was a clip composed of stuff that real fans made just because they’re fans and they wanted to share their respective talents on YouTube.

The first spot was for Lady Gaga, who has an extremely active social media following, check it out:
After less than three weeks it has gathered more than 1.1 million views and is currently the 19th most viewed video in the music category for the month of January on YouTube.

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Artist Feedback

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At this point, most major music artists are embracing social media to some extent, be it Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (), or personal blogs. Connecting directly with fans is extremely valuable, especially in an area like music that is such an inherently collective experience. To that end, the artists themselves have taken the lead on some of the promotions for the campaign.

Lady Gaga tweeted a link to her “We’re All Fans” video as soon as it went live (a day before it first aired on CBS) and embedded it on both her official website and her YouTube channel. Likewise, Beyonce () has also embedded her spot on her official website.

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Fan Feedback

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Fans, especially those featured in some of the TV spots, have responded really positively to the campaign — as you would expect. However, an interesting component to the We’re All Fans website is the FanBuzz Visualizer.

The visualizer (embedded at the right) is powered by Visible Technologies and it is a real-time visualization of fan activity across the web. Basically the widget (which is interactive — feel free to play with it and move it around) searches various social channels for comments, conversations and mentions of Grammy-nominated artists. This is then aggregated and you can see who has the most mentions within a certain window or overall.

Real-time visualizations are still new enough to be unique in and of itself, but what we find really interesting is that the information is available and shareable. For observers, this is insight into the online popularity of some of the nominated artists, for fans, it might be a way to push engagement.

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The Awards

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The Grammy Awards themselves will not be broadcast online (that’s a decision that is as much in the hands of CBS as it is The Recording Academy), but the Academy is making a conscious effort to keep fans engaged online before and during the show.

For 72-hours before the Grammy Awards air on CBS, Grammy.com will be streaming live performances on its website that are ancillary to the awards themselves. Plus, the now almost normative tradition of online red-carpet streamings will take place. During the themselves, Grammy.com will feature backstage interviews with winning artists, which is pretty cool. Even if Grammy isn’t ready to embrace online streaming of the award ceremony, they are at least aware that fans are likely to be online Tweeting or posting to Facebook during the broadcast. That’s a start.

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The Future

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When I asked Evan about the Academy’s plans for the future, he made it clear that social media is something the RA intends to continue to invest in. Internally the organization has been pleased with the results of the campaign and of the actual consequences of embracing social media. Fears about not being able to control the message seem to be largely assuaged when caution is thrown to the wind and engagement actually takes place.

True engagement is a major component of any successful social media endeavor. If the Recording Academy continues to embrace the shifting realities and engage with fans, the net result just might be that viewers and fans take a more active interest in the Grammy Awards.

What do you think about how established organizations are embracing social media? What do you think of the “We’re All Fans” campaign? Let us know!

Disclosure: Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Twitter’s Ev Williams and Biz Stone, MySpace’s Owen Van Natta and other notable social media influencers will attend the Social Media Rockstars panel this week, discussing the intersection of social media and music. Execs from all the companies will also attend the Grammys.

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What Social Followers Want

Brand marketers want consumers to follow them to build buzz and engagement, but social media users often desire something in return. What they’ve come to expect is a good deal, but many consumers—including the most active users of social sites—are also interested in deeper engagement.

A December 2009 MarketingSherpa survey indicated that learning about specials and sales was the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online, supporting the results of earlier surveys. But looking for savings was followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.

Users described as “max connectors”—those with at least 500 social connections—were less interested than average in getting deals. Instead, they cared about new products and company culture, demonstrating the deeper engagement expected by social media power users.

An earlier study, by Razorfish, also found that exclusive deals and offers were the primary motivation of US Internet users following brands on Twitter.

Respondents who friended a brand on Facebook or MySpace responded similarly, though they were more likely to become a fan because they were a current customer (32.9%) than were users of Twitter.

Sharing interesting content that users care about, along with the deals and discounts they have come to expect, will both keep them engaged and spur them to pass along marketing messages.

By: eMarketer Inc.
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Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

One word - WOW

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Facebook Grabs Social Networking Share

MySpace, Twitter fall behind

Not only has Facebook surpassed MySpace as the leading social network in the US, it has moved far ahead in terms of market share of US social networking site visits.

According to September 2009 data from Experian Hitwise, almost 59% of all social network category visits were at Facebook, compared with just over 30% for second-place MySpace.

That amounted almost to a tripling in share for Facebook year over year, while MySpace dropped 55%.

Twitter, in fourth place with 1.84% of social networking site visits in September 2009, posted a huge increase over September 2008. But reports of a Twitter slowdown are bolstered by the fact that the site actually lost share since August 2009, down 0.11 percentage points.

Time spent on Twitter was down year over year, by 56%. Average time spent on Facebook was up while MySpace dropped, but MySpace remained in the lead. Users surfed the site for an average of nearly 26 minutes in September 2009, as opposed to the 23 minutes spent on Facebook.

Experian Hitwise also reported that overall, US Internet users decreased their time spent on social networks by 20% in September 2009 compared with September 2008.

Social Site Users Depend on Their Networks

A trusted resource

Social networking is one of the most important activities—online and offline—among US social network users, based on results of Beresford Research’s “Use of Online Social Networks” white paper.

Among online activities, only e-mail was more popular than social networking. Chatting and even Web browsing ranked lower.

When asked to compare online social networking with several offline activities, social network users only found going out with friends more important. That put social networking ahead of real-life activities such as playing games, reading, watching TV and playing sports.

Beresford reported that posting photos was the top social networking activity, with 81% of respondents taking part, followed by responding to the posts of others and posting their own thoughts or activities. One-quarter linked to a company, product or service on a social network, and, notably, 38% reported clicking on paid advertisements.

Users put great trust in their social networks. One-half of Beresford respondents said they considered information shared on their networks when making a decision—and the proportion was higher among users ages 18 to 24, at 65%.

“This is a particularly important finding,” according to the report, “in that it suggests that these younger users have integrated social networks into their lives to such an extent that it has become a trusted resource for their decision making.”

While the results refer to decision-making in general, not just purchase decisions, they suggest a much greater reliance on social networks than earlier surveys. A March 2009 study by Knowledge Networks, for example, found that between 10% and 24% of US social media users turned to social networks when making purchase decisions about various categories of products and services. Less than 5% said they “always” did so.

Source-Emarketer.

Integrating email and social marketing: 20 questions to ask first

Email marketing is hot…and social marketing is even hotter.

The two fields are already holding hands and exchanging shy smiles across the dinner table: talk of marriage is in the air.

But before rushing off to add those Twitter links to the next email promotion, perhaps it’s worth thinking through the consequences.

Here a few relevant questions that crossed my notepad this week…

1. If we add “share this” links to an email, pointing at sites like Twitter and Facebook, do we have the kind of email content people will actually want to share?

Such links give people a way to share, but not a reason to do so. That’s the bigger issue.

2. If the content is not particularly shareworthy, does asking people to “Digg” our new telephone number make us look lame?

3. If the content is indeed shareworthy, do we get some benefit out of that?

4. How can we measure that benefit?

5. In fact, what kind of content/offers should we develop to give value to the recipient, encourage sharing, and give value to us through this sharing?

6. What sharing tools and links best maximize this value and spreadability?

7. Do these sharing tools and links take up email real estate that has better uses? Or draw attention away from other important calls to action?

8. If we add these “share this” links to social networks, are we raising expectations that we ourselves have an adequate presence on the destination sites?

9. If we use email to get people to follow us on Twitter, get our blog feed or become Facebook fans, are we simply switching people from one channel to another or are we creating extra contact points?

10. If people are switching from email to Twitter, Facebook, RSS etc., does that change their value to us? Is a Twitter follower more or less valuable than a Facebook fan…than an email subscriber…than a blog subscriber?

11. Does that matter? Is perhaps giving people more communication choices the only way to ensure their long-term attention and loyalty?

12. If people are switching, how can we deliver as much (or more) value through these new social channels as we do via email, so we don’t disappoint people?

13. If people are adding channels and following us at various places (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and via email), should the content delivered at each place be the same or different?

14. If the same, are we usefully reinforcing the message or simply contributing to fatigue and information overload?

15. If different, how different? Do we know how expectations and response behavior differ between email and social channels? Can we find out?

16. If different, have we thought through how the content and messages interact across these channels?

17. How do we design our social and email presence and content so that it works for those getting all of it AND those subscribing to only one of those channels?

18. Might we segment email subscribers by social channel? So that those who see us at Facebook and on Twitter could get different content and offers to those who don’t?

19. Who is in charge of all this integration?

20. How much is it costing and is this cost justified?

By: Mark Brownlow
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Twitter Brand Mentions are More Informational than Critical

A new study by Pennsylvania State University reveals that more brand mentions on Twitter are made by people seeking information about those brands than to praise or criticize them (as reported by eMarketer).

By studying almost 150,000 tweets that included brand mentions, it was found that nearly 50% of them were “comments”, which the study defined as tweets that mentioned a brand but were not about that brand.  18.1% of tweets that mentioned brands were posted by people who were providing information to others and 11.1% were made by people who were looking for information about a specific brand.  Nearly one-quarter (22.3%) of tweets that mentioned brands included an opinion about that brand, and most of those were positive comments about the brand.

Here is the breakdown of tweets that included opinions about brands:

• 52.4% were positive
• 14.2% were somewhat indifferent
• 33.5% were negative

While it’s great to learn that more opinionated brand mentions on Twitter are positive than negative, this information is probably not enough to convince every brand manager and executive (the bigger obstacle) to get on Twitter.  The fear is of that one-third that has negative opinions about the brand and voices them on the social Web.  However, by responding honestly to criticism and flooding the Internet with great content, the goal of brand managers is not to control the conversation but to correct inaccuracies and nudge the conversation in the “right” direction.

Giving up control of the brand conversation is frightening but it’s absolutely critical to social media success.  The key is monitoring the conversation and gently guiding it without controlling it.  That’s the balance that brand managers need to find, and that’s where the successful social media brands are separated from the rest of the pack.

Currently, some of the most successful brands on Twitter include @ComcastCares and @DellOutlet.  Both use Twitter very differently with @ComcastCares providing mostly customer service and informational tweets while @DellOutlet provides primarily discount and promotional announcements.  Both are successful because they provide useful and meaningful information.  There isn’t a single recipe for success for brands on Twitter yet.  In fact, there are different ways to attain some success, but what’s the best way to truly drive sales?  In comparing @ComcastCares and @DellOutlet, the answer would be @DellOutlet who drove millions of dollars of sales through its Twitter updates over the course of just a few years.  But at the same time, @ComcastCares has been very successful in meeting consumer needs for the brand.

The first step is determining what your brand goals are for Twitter — brand building, sales, customer service?  And then consistently and continually provide meaningful and useful information.  Monitor what is being said about your brand across the Twitter community and rein in inaccuracies and nudge the conversation in the direction that meets your brand’s strategic goals.  Twitter is a phenomenal tool for promoting brands, but it should be part of a long-term, relationship-building strategy enhanced by short-term tactics.

Image: Flickr

Written By: Susan Gunelius
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4 Lessons for Social Media Marketers

Too many marketers these days confuse what social media is. They don’t understand the difference between the evolution of marketing and what simply works right now. Social media is not just Facebook, Twitter, or even blogging. Instead of thinking about the platform, you have to think about the foundation that makes it effective.

The disconnect occurs when deciding on a social media plan. Telling someone to create a “Facebook strategy” or that they should “leverage Twitter” doesn’t always make sense. Instead of creating a plan around the goals of the campaign some marketers allow the platforms available to dictate the strategy.

So what are fundamentals? There are a number of lessons to be learned, and many come from experience, but here are four that I keep top of mind.

1. Always listen

Far too many brands get so excited about social media that they just jump right in. They don’t take the time to see what’s going on before engaging.

These brands are similar to the guy at a party that yells about his awesome TV while everyone else is talking about cars.

Comcast does an amazing job of listening. Their team monitors Twitter for any mentions of the brand and quickly responds to the consumer. Micro-blogging allows them to continually keep track of what is occurring in their space and offers them a platform to respond.

Social media takes time, patience, and vigilance to see and understand what your consumers are talking about. If you do it right, your consumers will embrace you instead of ignoring you.

2. The brand is public

Whether you like it or not, your brand is in the social sphere, but are you? No longer do you have full control over your marketing message, or what people see.

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Consider the latest Dominoes fiasco. Two employees and a video camera damaged a multi-million dollar brand. Consumers don’t differentiate between, employees, customer service, and the brand.

Recognizing that fact and being prepared to act can save you from a potentially embarrassing turn of events.

3. Don’t forget a personality

Ever had a friend with no personality? What makes you think a consumer will interact with a corporate brand with no personality?

Find a way to humanize your company, empower enthusiastic employees to speak for you. Let your consumers get to know what makes your brand special.

My favorite brand personality is Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. His humor and style of writing builds the Zappos community, one friend at a time. However, the Zappos personality doesn’t end there. Each employee of the company, as well as their policies, convey how important every customer is and how dedicated they are to building a real relationship.

Invite your customers to join in the company culture, and show off your personality. The average person is so tired of marketers that having an honest ‘friend’ is a breath of fresh air. Use that trust to build a relationship, loyalty, and a connection.

4. Creativity wins

A marketer with an understanding of social media and the need for engagement online tends to think outside the box. They don’t see Facebook or blogging, instead they see vessels for a conversation. Because of that mindset they’re poised to be creative with their social strategy.

One of the best examples of creativity is the Burger King “Sacrifice a Friend” application. The campaign encouraged users to delete 10 Facebook friends and get a free Whopper. It was fun, controversial, and a great idea. Consumers were excited about it, and it generated a huge amount of buzz. In the end, over 233,906 friends were sacrificed.

As more people fight for a shortening attention span, being creative and thinking of new ways to connect online is a necessity for social media marketing. Being fun and exciting motivates consumers to talk and interact, and although being first does not always guarantee success, it sure helps.

The more prevalent social media grows, the more likely a brand is to copy what someone else has already done. In social media, past successes don’t guarantee future results. That’s why it’s so important to understand the fundamentals, so you can take a strategy and evolve it for your specific brand.

By: Samir Balwani
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