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facebook is good for business!

I often get asked by clients about using Facebook for business.  “I know how to use Facebook, I have hundreds of friends and use it all the time,” a client said the other day. “I just can’t get my around using it for business.”

Think of Facebook as a cross between a blog and Twitter, where you can get a database driven real time streaming of user-generated content that allows sharing of links, photos, videos and much more.  Then Facebook is a powerful tool for businesses to build community and collaboration with their audiences. 

Perhaps you are a business which sells to other businesses (B2B) and want to influence end users and have them become part of your community.  Briggs Equipment did this successfully with its ForkLift Heroes Facebook page .Following some research, the materials handling provider realised that if it could engage the end users, the actual drivers of the forklifts that it sells, it could help to reduce damage bills and increase safety in the workplace for its clients. 

So it launched an integrated campaign, using trade and local press and online coverage, with the Facebook page being one of the ways that end users engaged with the brand. Anyone who signed up for the campaign, got a ‘Hero’ pack and you can see some of them wearing their t-shirts on the Facebook site. The hidden benefit of this campaign was that some of the company’s major national account customers took up the campaign as part of their own internal communications, to great success. Fans who join the page post pictures and even videos of their antics with Forklifts and what they are doing to care for them now they have their ‘hero’ packs from Briggs.

Target is a retail company that uses Facebook very successfully with over half a million fans on its page.  It posts useful videos to help people shop, has an interesting college page and encourages open dialogue with its customers through its ‘Review’ page.  It has customised its ‘Tab’ to include disccusions, video and College 09 to make its page more relevant.

A Facebook group may be the better option for you.  SmallbizPod has an active member community and Alex Bellinger, its founder, gains a significant amount of business through Facebook.

Rather than just jumping on the Facebook-for-business  band waggon, because you think it is trendy, you need to consider Facebook as a marketing tool.  And like any marketing campaign, you will need to have a strategy for how you will use your Facebook page. 

Consider the following when you are setting up your business Facebook page:

1. Who is your target audience?  and what are your objectives in trying to engage them?
2. What apps will you use?  Some to include are:
   1. Social RSS or networked blogs so that you can stream your blog and Twitter feeds into your Facebook page.
   2. Video apps – including Facebook’s own which is now pretty good.
3. What is your objective?  How many fans will you consider a ‘success’? How much conversation do you want to happen?
4. How will you promote the page and encourage people to participate?  A Facebook advert can sometimes help but there are many other ways.

Finally, like all social media marketing, you will need to be prepared for a cultural change.  Facebook is about user generated content and letting your audience create copntent and participate with your brand or your company.  So be prepared to loosen the reins on control!

Maximise your influence for social network leverage

How can we use Twitter and maximise what we Tweet to extend our influence, increase our followers and delight those who are following us? By understanding and applying the science of influence to Twitter we can do all of this.

Firstly a little about the science of influence (bear with me, this bit is important). Robert Cialdini, a distinguished professor of psychology undertook a big study of professional influencers, and found that the skill of influence is captured by six universal factors :

• reciprocity – the desire to give something back to those that give to us
• likeness/rapport – People are easily persuaded by other people that they like (this is the basis of Viral Marketing after all). i.e. People are more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them.
• commitment and consistency – being congruent and authentic with our values
• scarcity – a desire to have those things of which there are less (i.e. original content)
• social proof – people want to follow the lead of people just like them and people will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, as a child have you ever run into the middle of a busy market square and just stood there and looked up into the sky? Remember the crowd that soon gathered to stand by you and look up into the sky to see what you were seeing!
• authority – if we claim to be an expert on some topic we are more likely to be successful at influencing others

The term social media and social network inherently implies the act of influencing. After all, why are teens suddenly the fastest growing Twitter group?  They are influenced by celebrities. Here’s how you can use the science of influence to leverage your social network on Twitter to achieve this:

1. Add value, educate or make people’s lives better in some way - Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to share a link and to add value. Use a link to a photo to illustrate your tweet (TwitPic), upload a video from your phone via an email to YouTube, use qik.com live video streaming from your phone. Also use Twitter’s retweet functionality to add value to your network, by retweeting those that add value to you.
2. Manage your followers –Use the power of reciprocity send them a DM tweet, offer to introduce them to your network (tweet intro), are they actively contributing to your network with regular tweets that are adding value, educating you or making your life better in some way?
3. Who are you following? – are they following you? Are you enough ‘like them’ for them to want to follow you? Monitor if they follow you, if they don’t and they don’t power up your network, should you unfollow them? Have a good ‘purge’ of who you are following every now and then
4. Power up your retweets:
   •  Use retweetable words: ask for help! Please retweet, use of ‘you’, mention the following words: blog post, help, how to 
   • don’t be boring – avoid idle ‘what are you doing’ ‘status’
   • make sure you use good grammar and spelling
   • work hard to write original content and be original
   • don’t swear or self-reference
   • 1pm to 11pm and Thurs/Friday are the best retweet times – focus your activity here
   • Monitor your retweets and @replies – so that you can track what’s working  (see a great post here on this)
5. Aim for quality not quantity – it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to get as many followers as possible, perhaps you feel that popularity is measured in how many thousands of followers you have? But, like everything in life it is quality not quantity that matters. Quantity will follow quality anyway. Aim for quality of:
   • followers 
   • following 
   • quality of content
6. Promote conversations – Twitter is a marketing tool to promote conversations around your brand, your company and/or your chosen topic areas. It is forcing a move in the culture of marketing from one-way broadcast campaigns to two-way conversations. So make sure that your conversations are truly two-way – and not rambling monologues, or boring rants:
   • Make an effort to find out what topics are trending and what people are interested in – use hashtags to monitor trending topics and twitter serach to search on keywords.
   • Use tweetdeck to manage multiple conversations and trending topics
   • Use keyword optimisation – so people can spot you on twitter search directories like wefollow and track you on twilert
   • Retweet other people using their words and giving your own personal authority/endorsement

Twitter for online PR

Twitter is a very useful tool for business to business marketing and PR. I am a regular user of the microblogging social media site which now has 21 million US visitors per month.  Like any good networking tool it has brought me technical support, business ideas, business and a wide network of ‘lose connection’ friends.  Twitter is no longer the social platform for friends updating what they are doing in real time, but a crucial tool for brand marketing.

With a phenomenal 1382% year on year increase in unique users it is the fastest growing social marketing tool and, unlike Facebook with its strong teen and early 20s following, is most popular amongst working adults.

Statistics show that 50% of Twitter users are 35 yrs and older, 80% have no kids, a significant proportion are college grads/ post grads and more than half earn $60K plus per year. However the 18-24s are the fastest growing audience currently.  Probably due to their celebrity obsession (eek!)

But how can Twitter help B2B companies with their public relations?  Here are seven ways (by no means an exhaustive list) that Twitter can help:

1. Build relationships – follow and encourage followers with whom you want to build relationships.  Think carefully about your tweets – choose a nice balance of the professional and the personal.  Don’t think ‘what are you doing’ but ‘how can you add value’ or ‘how can you make this followers life better’?  Know your audience and make sure your 140 characters add advice, drama, desire, interest, or entertainment  (‘addie’) to their reading.  If journalists and the media are following you, you will forge stronger relationships if you get this balance right

2. Micro-campaigns for press releases – submit your most valuable or innovative or interesting online releases from your online media centre or your blog (or elsewhere), give readers and followers a big ‘why’ in the tweet. See each tweet as a powerful marketing message.

3. Online research and content tracking – Twilert, Twitter search etc to search for trending topics and social buzz. Track your most important keywords and use retweets, @replies and direct messaging to reply to those that are most important.  Track people who are retweeting or mentioning you in @replies and follow or reward them with thanks (or both)

4. Adding value through choosing who  to follow – follow inspiring, active and expert social networkers who will add value to your own content

5. Gain support – using your followers and the people you follow to help you gain support for your cause.  Ask them for opinions, advice, feedback

6. Crowdsource – if you need contributions for a feature you are writing, or want feedback on users or expert users to interview for a piece you can crowdsource your posts by requesting help or offering links or mentions of your contributors from Twitter

7. Retweet -  those links that are most in line with your own messages and themes – make sure they are high quality and don’t overdo it (a handful per day will do) this will help to expand your social network and add recognised value

It’s not rocket science.  This way you will gain some valuable and rewarding followers on Twitter, and build lasting social relationships. Over time, you will also find that your online PR coverage increases considerably too.

Conversation is two way.  And the best conversations, those that promote mutual learning and collaboration, can happen in the most unexpected situations. I have the most wonderful and enlightening conversations with the cleaner in our offices.  She is very wise and  I have a deep respect for her!

We already know from the previous posts that productive conversation involves the sharing of our thinking through high quality advocacy. And it involves taking responsibility for truly understanding the other person’s thinking through high quality inquiry. 

Inquiring into how other’s think

High quality inquiry involves seeking others’ views, probing at how they arrived at them and, critically yet hardest of all for most of us, encouraging them to challenge your perspective. This may require us to help them share, or even understand, their own thinking. This involves listening and questioning and sometimes gently challenging them. If you are a coach, you have a head start here!

Find out how others see the situation by asking them to give examples of the ‘data’ they have used and selected in their thinking and in reaching their conclusions.  You will need to help them tell you the steps they have used to get to their thinking. The most useful questions here are the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. 

•  ”What information did you use to reach that conclusion?”
•  ”What are you thinking here?”
• “what do you think about this?”
• “I’m really interested, can you tell me how did you get to that conclusion?”

Be open to challenge

Be open to be challenged on your own conclusions, stay open and curious and remain detached from being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ : recognise that two brains are most always better than one and that true colloboration will promote mutual learning and growth. “I notice that we have differing, opinions on this matter, and I”m really interested in finding out what I am missing that you have noticed.”

Openly ask for help in finding out what you may be missing that they are seeing.  Encourage the other person to identify the gaps or errors in your thinking.  If you maintain a state of high curiosity, this will keep your mind open and the dialogue productive even when you are convinced that you are ‘right’ and they are ‘wrong’.

Inquire into the non verbal language or emotion that the other person may be showing, but do this in a non-confrontational way.  “I notice that you frowned when you looked at that data; are you confused at all?”

And a great tip is to ask for help in exploring whether you are unknowingly contributing to the problem.  This will require you to put ego and arrogance well behind you!  “I get a feeling that something I am doing may be blocking this conversation moving forward, is that something you have noticed too?”

 Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Top tips for good conversations
• Sharing your thinking for high quality advocacy

gain insight into collective conversations

Conversation is about promoting mutual learning and the best conversations are happening on social networks these days.  However there is definitely an art to be mastered.

Once you have mastered your own thinking processes and understand your own conclusions and the data on which you have based them.  You are ready to share your thinking with others.

This is about helping others see what you see and how you think about it.  By giving examples of the data you select – telling stories, sharing anecdotes, using reference experiences – you will make your data clear (remember ‘data’ can be comments, information, statistics etc) .  Then you need to clearly state the meaning that you find in these examples, clarifying and explaining the conclusions that you have drawn. As part of this proces you may need to further need to explain the steps in your thinking.

For example in conversation with a Twitter contact the other day I was sharing information about a blogging problem I had come across. The particular ‘data’ I shared included the type of blog, how I was using it, and the particular problem I had noticed (an error on screen).  The meaning that I had drawn from this data was that there was an error on the site – i.e. something that I had done ‘wrong’. However, whilst indeed an error was reported, it was related to something different and the conversation helped clear that up.

A truly productive conversation also means that in sharing your thinking, you are also helping to clarify the other person’s thinking. Describe your understanding of the other person’s reasoning by reflecting back to them what you understand: “The way I understand what you have just said is that you look at the data and see declining market share, is that right?”. 

If, during the course of your conversation, you do disagree with the other person, or perhaps see negative consequences to what they intend doing, you can make this clear in the conversation in a way that does not get the other person’s back up.  If you state or identify what you see these consequences to be, but avoid attributing ‘intent’ to create those consequences to the other person, you stay on neutral ground and maintain the space of productive dialogue. 

For example: “John, I notice that you have not mentioned anything about communicating the plan to the customer at this point. I have noticed in my own customer relationships that early communication helps to gain agreement. If some sort of communication will help smooth over the relationship, do you think it will be worth considering?”  Distinguish between intent and impact so that a more productive outcome is achieved.

And finally, if the conversation gets more heated, and there is more conflict and emotion involved, if you feel that you have to disclose your emotions do so without implying that the other person is responsible for creating your emotional reactions.

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Why productive dialogue is key to accelerating organisational success
• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession