March 24th 2011 · Read More · Comments Off
Since I last wrote about this topic, the social media field has continued to develop at a great rate.
With all the new possibilities springing up, you could easily spend all your working day being “social”. So what to choose? How to keep everything up to date?
Inevitably as this field develops, there are more people concentrating on building expertise in this section of the internet. I’m working with one of them on a project at the moment and it’s going to be fascinating to see what effect it’ll have on my client’s business.
Briefly though, for people who just want a quick overview, here’s what seems to have changed in the last few months:-
Facebook continues to grow and grow. Not only for friends and family to interact (and yes, sometimes in my house that’s the way the kids talk to each other!) but also for businesses to get involved with their customer base. No doubt because of this wide appeal, Facebook is growing but MySpace is cutting back on staff. Myspace seems to have settled more into a role as publicity for musicians, bands and creative types.
Twitter is still going strong but its role in terms of a business tool is becoming more focused on either again keeping in touch with customers (especially on the move since it lends itself to mobile/smartphone use) or checking on hot topics.
YouTube is a great way of putting a personal touch on a business, and of course for sharing and hosting advertising videos. Another way also of getting links back to your main website.
Becoming more useful are blogging platforms such as Blogger and Tumblr. More of this in future posts I’m sure.
And finally, LinkedIn continues to grow in importance, especially to anyone who is providing any kind of consultancy service. In addition to developing connections, it’s a good way of displaying recommendations to the wider community. If you have time to get involved, you can use the Answers (and of course questions) feature to share your expertise – great for building credibility and more links back to your site or blogs.
June 24th 2010 · Read More · Comments Off
This topic will certainly pop up again.
For now though, just a few comments.
There is no doubt that social media are a popular topic, and many gurus are writing about the merits of the various systems available. At the time of writing, a brief summary of their uses is as follows:
Facebook – great for engaging with your target market and particularly for finding out what makes them tick. Facebook’s Keyword system allows you to see a fascinating range of subjects that might interest your target group. With Facebook you have to remember that it’s a fairly captive and static group that will be looking at any adverts you place, so you need to refresh them often.
When setting out to use Facebook, think carefully if you want a personal page that your friends and customers will all see; or a Group – small but targetted and you can send out active messages to everyone in the group; or a business page – more like a website for your business, no limit to how many people can become a fan.
Twitter demands regular attention if you are to maintain a presence. There is a fine balance here between regular messages to keep your followers engaged, and so many in a day that they become irritated and switch you off. Think carefully about how much time you will have to keep this going. Twitter does have another use, which is as a source of information on what people are talking about, what their concerns are, and even possibly who some of your competitors are and what they are up to. A tweet of a question such as “who knows a good way to xxxx” is likely to pull in a few useful answers.
LinkedIn is developing rapidly. Whilst it has an obvious role in displaying your cv and current activities to other users, it is becoming a place to advertise, and certainly is being used more and more as a source of employment leads – to hire people and to canvas for business opportunities.
MySpace is currently looking like the essential place for anyone in the popular music business to have a presence but has less of a role for other businesses.
Even if you don’t want to have an active presence on these systems, it is a good idea to set up an account with your business name, if only to stop anyone else doing so. If you want to go into social media actively, think carefully about how you will dovetail with your website and/or blog. And don’t underestimate the time it will take you to manage your social media presence, particularly if you manage to develop an active and engaged community.
February 9th 2010 · Read More · Comments Off
Your Own Site Forum
Do you know all your current and potential customers personally?
No of course you don’t. You can’t, you don’t know who they all are. And that means they don’t know you either.
The first point of contact with your potential customers is often your website. This then is your opportunity to demonstrate who you are, what you do, and your level of expertise. A well-managed forum can help you with this.
Although it takes time, allowing visitors to your site to ask technical questions to which you provide useful and knowledgeable answers is an excellent means of showing off your skills. You can also build empathy with your site visitors, becoming a “real” person with whom they can have a “real” conversation. You’re no longer just a name on the internet somewhere.
Other Sites
That’s on your own site. Of course another useful way to build credibility is by being a lurking expert on other people’s forums. This may additionally give you an opportunity of driving traffic to your own site, if you are able to put your web address in your signature or post.
Look for interest groups related to your work. Maybe there is a particular software you use which has an enthusiastic user community. Or is there a local networking group with a forum sharing experiences of trading in your area.
Common Guidelines
Whether it is your own or someone else’s forum to which you are contributing, the golden rules are the same:
1. Contribute regularly
2. Make your contributions relevant, useful, factual and courteous
3. Never disparage someone else’s contribution, even if it’s on your own site and you disagree. If you have to respond to someone breaking the rules of your own forum, explain that they are out of line but do so politely.
November 5th 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
What do your customers think?
The Influence of the “Impartial Review”
Big retailers like Amazon have found that customers are being influenced more and more by the reviews of their products provided by other purchasers. Customer reviews are seen as being impartial, and reflect how the item in question is used in real life rather than ideal test conditions.
Naturally if you sell something and ask for reviews, you’re going to hope that those reviews will be a glowing tribute to the fantastic object just bought, and the superb service of the wonderful firm that sold it! Alas this won’t always be the case.
So why use a forum for collecting feedback?
Well the one thing about straightforward star ratings or quick reviews is that with some systems it’s difficult to respond. Ideally (and remembering that this could take time) you will want to use a Feedback Forum as a two-way conversation with your customers. Got positive feedback? Thank them and promise to keep up the good work. Got negative feedback? Well if it’s justified, apologise and explain how you’re going to do better. That makes you look human and genuine, likely to increase trust. If the complaint isn’t justified, at least you have the chance to put your side of the story.
But what if all I get is “moan moan moan”
Ouch. It could happen, and it’s not nice to be on the end of a moan. But do remember that if it’s a moan on your forum, you can see it, you have a chance to respond to it, and importantly, it’s telling you something you badly need to know about your products or services. In this Web 2.0 world, if your customer can’t tell you about their bad experience, you can be sure that they’re telling everyone else on Twitter, Facebook, or in extreme cases, the blog they’ve created specially for all your other dissatisfied customers to complain on! Think I’m exaggerating? Think again. I’ve seen just such a blog (generally to do with broadband. *sighs*)
The saying “A complaint is an opportunity” applies
As with more traditional customer complaint handling, you can use the way you deal with forum feedback as a driver to making improvements to your products or to the way that you operate. Tell the customers through your forum and website what you’ve done! Now instead of just being any old supplier, you are a supplier with a human face who really cares about what customers think, responds positively to problems, and looks for opportunities to improve.
Do be careful to monitor comments and screen out gratuitous filth
Sadly not everyone is going to complain in a considered, rational and polite manner and you don’t want to put other users off reading your forum… Make sure you have clear forum rules about use of bad language and personal insults (ie not allowed!) and do avoid getting into libel difficulties. If the rules are clear, you can go in and edit posts to clean them up or delete if really off the wall. Do remember to explain why though.
Seek opinions on new products or features
If you’re worried about having to spend a lot of time moderating a feedback forum, you could open one for a limited time, purely as a way of canvassing views about new products. You could ask if there are missing features, or what people think about the existing products. Although you could run a survey instead, using a forum allows you to go in and perhaps ask follow-up questions to clarify the points people make.
Many ways to use feedback
I hope I’ve convinced you that a feedback forum could have a place in your business. If you’re interested in implementing one, do contact me, Caroline Hogarth, at Sort Out Your Site.
October 26th 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
Blue Peter Makes page
For anyone who grew up with Blue Peter on the BBC, it’s second nature to look at an object and think “I could make a Christmas Decoration/lovely present for Aunt Mabel/Tracey Island out of that”. Do you sell “objects”? Well if so, wouldn’t it be great to collect together all your customers’ ideas of what else they’ve done with your products that you haven’t thought of yet?
That’s the idea behind this kind of forum.
It works for all kinds of things. Do you sell clothing? Ask buyers to post pictures of themselves in your outfits. Do you sell food? Ask for recipes – here you could encourage feedback from people who’ve tried out the recipes too.
Of course the “More Ways To Use..” forum is an ideal addition to any site which is selling the raw materials for making other things, whether that’s food or hobbycraft, or full-scale construction materials.
Your Own Ideas
Naturally you will have many ideas of your own on how your products could be used. These should be used to kick off the forum topics and invite comparisons and further success stories. I am of course assuming that we are not talking about any items subject to licensing requirements, since non-standard use of some things could be outside the license and create all kinds of problems.
But putting that aside, a great way of kicking off the forum would be to post pictures, recipes, worksheets or instructions for downloading. Then invite comments from readers, and encourage them to share their own stories.
You could offer an incentive such as a monthly prize for the best idea – this has an added benefit if you can get people to provide you with addresses for your mailing list at the same time.
People usually enjoy talking about their ideas and successes, especially to a receptive audience which will give them lots of appreciation. Make sure you at least are that appreciative audience! Commenting on people’s comments will inspire others to take part in a conversation. In no time, there you are personalising your company to its customer base, and inspiring confidence in the products.
Can you afford not to run a forum like this?!
As ever, you need to be vigilant about what is posted on your site. You or a team of invited moderators will need to check the comments and respond or prune as appropriate.
But so long as you sort out that aspect, you could end up with a self-generating, keyword rich resource helping your Search Engine Optimisation and building customer loyalty with less effort than you’d need to generate the same level of content yourself.
If you’d like a forum installing to complement your website, Sort Out Your Site would be very happy to help you.
Just Contact Us.
October 13th 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
FAQs
This is an excellent way to both collect and answer “Frequently Asked Questions”.
Starting Up
Well you probably have a set of questions that you know people either have asked or will ask. Your first Topic should therefore be FAQ and you can list each one of your questions and the response. I’d suggest that you close this topic, so that users can’t simply add more comments or responses – set up a separate Topic for them to do that. Best to keep the FAQ section clean as it will be somewhere that you would expect a lot of traffic.
Developing the community
Allow new topics to spring up in something like an “Ask the Community” topic or subforum. You could divide this from the start into “Questions” and “Successes”. Encourage users who have a query which isn’t covered in the FAQ to put it in the Questions section. You will naturally need to haunt this forum in order to provide answers, but you may well find that there are other enthusiasts who take part regularly. If some of these are genuinely helpful and keen, it could be worth your while to set them up as official “gurus” with some kind of incentive. As these are people who are not employed by you, you must remember to add some sort of disclaimer about answers on the site being given in good faith, and that views expressed are not necessarily representative of the Company.
Moderation
As your community develops, you will need to keep a close eye on the content of your forum. If it starts to really get going, you may no longer be able to manage moderation (i.e. policing the content) yourself and you may need to rope in other moderators. This is where enthusiastic community members could perhaps be enlisted if you don’t have enough people in-house to manage it. You’ll need a set of clear rules for the forum, to ensure a consistent approach and avoid argument. Moderators should be invited, and some sort of incentive such as a discount for long-service or answering a particular number of queries could be a good idea. Special “rank” seems to go down well. Don’t forget that if the moderators themselves operate their own websites, and they are allowed to use a signature including a link, then that gives an additional benefit of increasing traffic to their site and is an incentive in its own right.
Building FAQ
Don’t forget to collect more FAQ from regular queries in the forum. Your main aim is customer service, and a customer would rather be able to go straight to the right place for an answer. I’ve seen too many boards where the answer to a common question is buried in a long discussion somewhere.
Which leads to another Must – make sure you have a good search facility as the forum grows. Only the desperate are going to spend a long time looking for an answer to their query. If they don’t find it quickly, they’ll search elsewhere and you’ll lose control of the answer they are given….
October 7th 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
Zebra speaking
Capturing Conversations
I first came across forums in connection with one of my hobbies. Here at last was a means of communicating across the world with the otherwise isolated fellow-enthusiasts I’d longed to make contact with. Essentially, a forum or bulletin board is a way of capturing conversations on the internet. Unlike chat-rooms (or instant messaging services) where the individual messages are generally short and disposable, on a forum you can often include articles or instructions for discussion, and the responses are all captured and can be further organised if necessary into separate conversation “threads”.
Uses
Now if you think about it there are several ways in which capturing a conversation could benefit your business. This is a way of engaging and consulting your customers with relatively little effort or cost after all.
Here are some ideas. I’ll develop these in more detail in later posts.
1. Technical Support
Support fora are very popular in the IT world in particular. What a great idea to tap into the combined expertise of all the users of your particular product. You may well find that ideas are generated for new uses for the product, you will certainly pick up any signs of recurrent problems or weak areas, and so often enthusiastic users will come up with new ideas for incorporation – “It’s great but I wish it could do…”
2. More Ways To Use…
Sell something that can be made into something else? This could include foodstuffs or craft materials. A forum can be an excellent way to collect suggestions for recipes or patterns. You can seed it yourself and ask for contributions from customers – you could give prizes or discounts to encourage quality contributions.
3. Feedback
To be used with caution and a stiff upper lip!
Feedback from customers is known to be a great influence on potential purchasers. How you answer the feedback is key – if there is a complaint or dissatisfaction you’ll need to deal with it, and publish the results. However if you’re really serious about your customer service and product quality, this could be a powerful tool in your favour.
4. Building Credibility
Particularly useful for consultants who are basically selling information and their own expertise. If you set the scene by creating a series of articles and then inviting comments to which you respond, you are establishing your own expertise and developing that essential sense of relating individually to potential clients.
Don’t forget that if any of these forums are directly connected/part of your website, then all the information that is generated on the fora will contribute to your search engine optimisation efforts. Just imagine, loads of new, keyword-rich content that you haven’t had to write yourself!
Read more information about membership sites here.
October 1st 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
We are all used to screening our email for the dreaded spam. Fake Rolex, dodgy pharmaceuticals, charming ladies who’d just love to meet us (why never charming gentlemen?!) and worst of all, naked photos. I had them all before my ISP smartened up its act – my mailbox is fairly clean now, and I’d guess that’s typical for most people.
Sadly the spammers are all too ingenious and started to look elsewhere for targets. Blogs and bulletin boards were a magnet.
I manage a bulletin board for an interest group. When it was set up, the brief was quite clear that although the discussions could be viewed by anyone, taking part was only for registered members, and only paid-up members of the society could be registered. Despite this, I am constantly having to delete attempts at signing up from usernames like “ffggdd” or “cheappills”. Barack Obama has tried to sign up twice now!
Why is it important to keep your board clear of spammers? I’m afraid I’ve seen a few boards that have been attacked and they quickly become nothing but a stream of adverts and links for all kinds of rubbish. Because the postings are often automated, it would be practically impossible to keep up manually deleting bad posts. Much better to keep them out in the first place.
So what to do?
I’m basing my comments on phpBB but you will find similar features in all good bulletin board systems.
Firstly, avoid allowing just anyone to sign up. Ensure that new applications are held in a moderation queue for checking. If you are planning on building a big community site where it would be impossible for you to single-handedly administer all registrations, make it a priority to enlist moderators who can do some of the screening for you. You could even charge a very small fee for joining – Amember is a good system for this. Anyone who is really interested will pay up, especially if you can give away some digital product at the same time.
Secondly, as you screen new members, use the “Whois” or IP lookup facility to check where the new members come from. If like me you are administering a site for a highly regional group, it will be clear that applications from Russia or the Netherlands or USA are not legit.
Thirdly, keep an eye on the discussions (this can also be farmed out to moderators). At the first sign of any unwelcome posting, don’t hesitate to block the member and add the related IP to a blocked list.
Fourthly, use a “CAPTCHA” of some kind to help screen out automated applications – not totally foolproof but will help. That’s where part of the sign-up process includes typing in disguised letters. In theory computers can’t recognise these, but they are getting cleverer so it doesn’t always work and there are a small number of genuine potential members who have problems distinguishing the type.
Constant Vigilance
Above all, do keep an eye on your bulletin boards. If you’re running one because it’s your own interest, it sets a good example and helps keep things lively if you take part in discussions regularly. If you’re running one for someone else, you still need to watch what’s happening so you can stop problems early.
One of the saddest things I ever saw was a forum which was supposed to be for software support, totally ruined by spam postings. You would go in with some quite innocent question related to the software, and retreat feeling, well, contamintated, so horrible were the spam posts! Not pleasant, not professional, and most definitely not a good advert for your business or society.
September 23rd 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
Webinars are an excellent tool for many businesses. For any application where it would be good to present information direct to a number of (current or potential) clients or customers, the idea of being able to talk and show information from the comfort of your own office has great appeal.
I’ll be coming back to this them later.
With one of my clients in particular, I have been exploring the capabilities and ease of use of a number of readily available webinar systems. We’ve been challenging the technology as we’ve been looking for a number of features which seem to test the furthest reaches of what is currently available.
1. Desktop sharing
2. Recording capability (preferably also ability to edit afterwards)
3. Up to 200 attendees
4. VOIP to keep costs down (voice over internet protocol i.e. speak over the internet)
5. Mac and PC compatible
Dim-Dim is an excellent way to get started with Webinars. It has a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) capability built in, allows the host to broadcast video eg from a webcam, plus desktop or application sharing, and there is a free version for use by up to 20 people. We found that the VOIP component let it down; lots of echo and delay. We’d need to look at this one with teleconferencing, and the current numbers are in the US (although you can speak to them about international dial-in numbers)
Webex is one of the biggest names in web conferencing and is used by many large companies. It works very well indeed using a dial-in landline number, but there is a high cost involved which must be set against the benefits you are hoping to get out of it.
Megameeting promises the same experience as Webex but with much lower prices. In practice we had a few technical hitches using VOIP and their recording software still isn’t available for Mac. We’re going to look at it again as soon as the Mac version is issued.
A very quick look at Nefsis and a nice Tweet from one of their marketing people confirmed that it isn’t suitable yet as no Mac support.
One more to look at – iLinc. The features sound good on the website, so watch this space…
And currently under investigation – GoToWebinar. This one is extremely popular but has only recently become available in a Mac-compatible version. I’ll report back on this when we’ve tried it out.
Another time, I’ll write about some of the uses for webinar systems.
September 23rd 2009 · Read More · Comments Off
I’ve thought for some time that it would be a good idea to set up a blog for Sort Out Your Site.
Here I’m going to be sharing some ideas, experiences and helpful links that I hope you will find interesting and useful as you seek to get the best results out of your website.
Do feel free to leave comments.
Since I last wrote about this topic, the social media field has continued to develop at a great rate.