Content Mitigation: How Sharing Service Details Could Keep You Out of A Crisis

So, you’re using content marketing — articles, blogs, e-newsletters, case studies, videos, and social media platforms — to build brand awareness, customer acquisition, lead generation and customer retention. Work all of these as far as you can take them.

Then take it one step farther.

Producing helpful, educational and valuable content isn’t just for attracting customers. It can be an invaluable ally if something between your company and a customer goes awry, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. Because somewhere, somehow, someone will find something with which to take issue.

Supplying varied and detailed information on your company’s product or service in the form of an ongoing blog series or an expansive FAQ that answers an exhaustive series of questions could help mitigate potential problems and even help tamp down a full-blown crisis if enough instructive information is available and accessible.

Leaving these elements out of your content mix could cost you time, money and potentially your firm’s reputation.

Realistically, not everyone is going to read everything related to your product or service, but having it available within a couple of clicks on a keyboard could be enough to make a news organization beg off a story if information countering an issue is within easy reach.

What should you share in content mitigation program?  Everything possible, such as:

    • Guarantees/Warranties – Be explicit and don’t bury the fine print.
    • Cost/Price – If you have a service that doesn’t have set price because each situation is different, explain what the variables are and supply a range of price, from the lowest to the highest.
    • Problems/issues – No service can be all things for all people. Detail the limitations of your product or service.
    • Comparisons with Competitors – Explaining differentiation between all comers in your niche lets prospects self select and lays bare stark differences.
    • Regulatory Compliance – If you work in an industry where adhering to federal regulations differentiates you from more lax competitors, ensure you explain why you do and how you do it.
    • Scope of Work/Payment – Particularly for potentially high-priced services where scope could change based on circumstances, keep the customer apprised of the charges so there won’t be a surprise at the end that could turn into a public issue… and a potential lawsuit.
    • Accolades/Awards/Testimonials – Your customers, third party endorsements and awards for quality weave a powerful story.  Tell it.
    • Approach/Philosophy – Most businesses have a story of why they began the business and/or guiding principles of how they work. Creating narratives like this make you appear more human and accessible.
    • Limitations/Usage Policies – Your business isn’t super human.  Explain what your business and service is and is not capable of doing.
    • Training/Education – Do your employees undergo intensive education about how to execute their jobs for optimum outcome and value?  Spell it out.
    • Personnel qualifications – The job your company does is only as good as the employees that do it.  For highly technical and regulated industries, offer up details of the training and experience of your employees
    • Consumer/Client Ratings – If you receive consistently high ratings from internal surveys and external ranking services, promote those high scores to help validate your value.
    • Accreditation/Endorsement– Positive reviews from third parties, such as associations and non-profit groups can help bolster credibility.

 

All of these suggestions may or may not be applicable to your business, but err on the side of caution in supplying as much about your service as possible. Because anything that could be misunderstood and misinterpreted will be.

Prove It All Night… Or Not

I can’t help but think of Bruce Springsteen when talking about social media because of his song, “Prove It All Night.” It’s not so much the lyrics (although you could make the case for a loose analogy on winning the ephemeral “love” of a customer), it’s the title.

Companies have so many channels and opportunities created by social media to honestly communicate and actively prove why (and sometimes why not) their product or service stands above other competitors. The active engagement that is necessary is what contrasts how things used to be done with the surface-visible sheen of advertising and printed pieces.

Back in the day (before 2005), businesses spent untold tens of thousands writing, editing and designing some static and barely useful “look-how-great-we-are” tomes that had no more use or relevance than day-old newspapers lining birdcages. How long did writers labor over every word, weaving a narrative on how wonderful said company was, while artists suffered over the layout of trying to put a human face on an organization that didn’t dare, nor really care, show it real face?

Social brought to a close to what I call the age of “collateral damage”, as well as the websites that took their place, employing an array of devices to display a company’s plumage, rather than the feathers that give it flight. Social changed everything.

But not for everybody.

We’re well into Web 2.0 and so many businesses still don’t (and maybe never will) understand how using the Internet and the overabundance of social media tools can help them connect with their audiences.

Maybe they’re not meant to be.

Do a quick search for advice on how to best differentiate products and services and you’ll get widely divergent answers. Some praise the advantage of product benefits and personal relationships. Others think warranties, guarantees, uniqueness, service, and the customer experience are trump cards. And, yes, some people believe that low price alone will win the day.

I believe that most products and services, even in highly competitive and commoditized markets, can be effectively marketed. But a good percentage will never put the effort into finding what makes their offering distinctive and look for the correct combination of marketing and social tools to locate, attract and share their knowledge with the right audience.

 

The Value of Being Merely Present in Social media

How does the old adage go? “Showing up is half the battle?” Something similar can be said for social media. Big things can happen by being merely present.

Bookshelves and hard drives brim with all kinds of information about social media ROI, and for a good reason. Any foray into social media (like any implement in the marketing toolkit), requires having a goal.  Without it, how will you know if you succeeded?

Now, by “merely present”, I don’t mean setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter account and randomly posting self-promotional or irrelevant dribble. But neither do I mean an organizational upheaval to align a company as the prototypical “social business”.

What fascinates me are the companies, both large and small, that have done a little in social media and realized huge returns. Not through exhaustively, well-planned strategy and benchmarking, but with simple goals and objectives.

From personal experience, one of our clients wanted to double the amount of visits to his page within a colossus corporate website. Simply by sharing existing subject matter content to two dedicated LinkedIn groups produced an eight-fold increase in visitors… and by the end of the year, $3 million in new revenue.

Now, that’s all great, right?

To be honest, the client was using newsletter advertising and exploiting an email database to alert others to the available content. But here’s the thing. How much of this little social outreach program contributed directly to that result?

We don’t know.

The client doesn’t know.

What the client is sure of is that what we recommended and helped him execute had a hand in delivering dollars. For our part, we thought the issue through, used a little research that told us where to direct the content firepower, and applied what budget was available to hopefully make a difference.

Another example is our new friend, Kyle Thill, of Toyota-Lift of Minnesota. He took to social media simply because Toyota reduced his advertising budget and encouraged use of social media because it was “low cost”.

Kyle decided to pull from what he knew and what he thought his customers would benefit from: simple sharing of information that could help people who are in the market for forklift sales and service.

In keeping with that idea of low cost, Kyle stated that Toyota-Lift “can’t afford too many calories to be spent on analytics… If what we are doing makes sense, we’ll simply ‘do it’.”

It must be working. That simple sharing benefited Toyota-Lift with a 10 percent increase in sales last year and this. Again, there was no grand strategy, but just being present. And in Kyle’s case, a lot.

Looking at examples like these two, there is no direct, attributable line of cause and effect. However, effort and activity leads to some sort of impact, as some of these examples of social marketing successes did.

As our examples demonstrate, it appears the results were an essential mix of understanding where your audience is; an awareness of how they use and consume information on the Internet; and having some kind of benchmark and rudimentary metrics.

Honestly, we prefer strategic planning to flying by the seat of your pants any day.  But when resources are scarce, a smaller, but still smart, presence can potentially be worth far more than none at all.

What’s your take?  What social programs have you seen that produced outsized results?

Social Media Lessons from Chicago’s Top 10 Social Corporations

In the spirit of our new blog feature, the SMB/B2B Social Spotlight, we decided to share some important takeaways from the 10 Chicago-area companies said to be doing the best job of leveraging social media. The companies’ programs were detailed in Crain’s Chicago Business earlier this year. 

I found the comments in bold instructive. We focus on B2B, but these tips from several consumer companies may inspire something new for your own social media programs.

1. Kraft Foods Inc.

“When they want recipes, they go to the website.  When they want to share their passion, they go to Facebook,” says the senior director of consumer relationship marketing at Kraft.

Takeaway: Companies often struggle when it comes to posting to their Facebook pages.  Encouraging and/or finding new ways to help your customers share their passion is useful. For example, Kraft launched a “Share Your Latin Flavor” campaign featuring a celebrity chef’s recipes to get customers involved in the conversation – and increased traffic in the process.

2. McDonald’s Corp.

“Our Facebook fans want entertainment.  They want information, but they want to see interesting videos, play games and participate in polls,” says the company’s director of social media.

Takeaway: How can you inject fun or entertainment into your Facebook pages?  Your posts can go beyond just talking about topics directly related to the company.  Find and post interesting or fun articles related to your industry (these are easy to find by just running a Google alert or setting up a listening dashboard on Google Reader on your product or service. You’re bound to find something of the right flavor there.).  Think about customers as people – what might they be interested in?

3. Sears Holding Corp.

“We want to stop problems quickly and act on customer feedback,” says Sears’ president of online marketing and financial services.  The company is using social media – Facebook and Twitter – as well as a customer review site called MySears.com.

Takeaway: Creation of a customer comment website shows the power of sites like Yelp.com that allow people to talk about their experience with a product or service.  (Why have customers broadcast their comments only on external sites, when you’re the best resource to respond to them?)  Sears also lets customers vote for which products they want to see discounted, and then runs the sale shortly thereafter — a nice way of generating interaction with customers.

4. Motorola Mobility Holdings

Succeeding at building awareness and sales, Motorola promoted its new photon 4G phone with a contest using promotional videos on Facebook, running them during random times every day. Customers who watched all the videos had a chance to win a new phone.

Takeaway: Giveaways, contests, polls all are great vehicles to use whenever you want to spice things up.  As always, giving people a good reason to get involved and respond increases interest.

5. Walgreen Company

“Two social networks are better than one,” says Walgreen’s director of social media.  The company used Foursquare and Facebook Places in a “Check-In’s that Make a Difference” campaign to distribute $6 million in flu shot vouchers to selected charities.  Whenever someone ‘checked in’ at a store, Walgreens donated a voucher.  Those who participated then took a Facebook vote on how to distribute the vouchers to the charities.

Takeaway: Good example of using the social toolkit in a creative and socially responsible way.  There are so many ways to connect to a customer on social media.  You just need to give it a little thought.  Start by understanding how they’re using social media – check-in’s being one way.

6. Deere and Company

An unlikely social media player, the farm equipment manufacturer has a large following after just one year of using social tools. “People want to touch the brand in social media,” says Deere’s manager of Internet research and information services.  They’ve succeeded by getting involved in industries in which Deere has an authoritative voice.

Takeaway: Yes, people WANT to touch your brand. To generate content for social platforms, your company can capitalize on this pointer:  In what areas, industries or perspectives does your company have an authoritative voice?  This one should be easy, because most companies consider themselves leaders.  Act like one with your social media content.

7.  Boeing Company

“It doesn’t benefit us to be jumping around to every tool or possibility that’s out there,” says the communication director.  “We want to make sure that the tools were using are the ones we can use effectively to serve our communications purposes.”

Takeaway: Sage words from Boeing. Social media is a tool, and while hip and still new to some companies, it’s not the only right answer to reach your audience, or your objectives.

8.  Allstate Corp.

Describing its “Mayhem” advertising character that personifies what can go wrong behind the wheel, director of consumer engagement says, “In social media, you want to be as relevant as you can to the audience.  The videos have really resonated with consumers.”  The campaign has gone viral with millions of hits on social platforms.

Takeaway: How can you increase your company’s relevance through social media?  Know thy customer!  Think creatively about how you can present your wisdom.  Involve staff outside of marketing.  Get help from professionals that know how to craft a compelling story.

9.  Abbott Labs

Individual products can be more popular on social platforms than the companies themselves. Abbott’s EAS Sports Nutrition line is marketed to fitness buffs, reaching many thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook, far fewer than its corporate pages.

Takeaway:  This advice probably rings true for many types of companies that offer a flagship product or service.  While promoting an entire company can seem a daunting task, you can really hone in with your content (and concentrate your time) around a single product/service or product line. 

10.  Discover Financial Services

Discover’s goal is immediate response time, measured in seconds, not hours or days, says the company’s vice president of e-business.  “The medium makes it possible for customers to comment, so you better have your best game on.”

Takeaway: As you already know: you must be ready and willing to respond quickly.  This is the age of real-time marketing and pr. Remember that every comment is a potential conversation between you and your valued customers, visitors or readers.  You never know what kind of great ideas might come out of the conversation, negative or positive. Expect to be changed!

 

 

How Getting Personal Can Synch You With Your Customers

Talk about getting personal.

Here’s a fun story about getting and giving attention on a one-to-one level.

As reported on CBS TV Chicago in early February, local high school student Keenan Cahill found out just how much attention he could get by simply having fun.  He could’ve never expected the outcome.

Affected by a life-threatening disease called MPS-6 that stunts his growth — and dreaming about one day being an actor or singer — the outgoing teenager began videotaping his lip-synching routines to various hit songs, and posting them online.

His antics attracted the attention of Katy Perry, who recognized his fun video via Twitter, and sent out a link to the video.  The results?  The video went viral, and Cahill became an “Internet sensation.”

Even better, he began getting personal visits from 50 Cent, Tyra Banks and others who went so far as to join him in his Elmhurst, Illinois bedroom so they could ‘co-star’ with the lip-syncher.

Imagine a famous singer knocking on your front door!

Can we find lessons here for business?  Indeed.

The music stars recognized:

  • A fan’s interaction with their content (in this case, music)
  • The chance to further expose what this young man was doing to their other fans – since it benefited them from a pure publicity perspective
  • An opportunity to do good by:

- Showing up at his home to share in his excitement and fun takes on their songs
- Showing their humanity and support of a disabled teenager, leading to a thrilling outcome   that surely has changed his life.

This can no doubt be an inspiration for the B2B world.

  • What if … You and your staff found more (and more interesting) ways to connect with how your customers use your products or services, on a one-to-one level?
  • How can you go the extra mile to recognize their success, or help them achieve greater success?
  •  How can you SURPRISE your customers in a similar way (even one, two or three customers a year)?

Every company wants its videos to go viral.  While most business products and services don’t have a Hollywood aura, often we’re all too stuck in the boring business world to find (or put) the humanity into our stories.

This is the beauty of the connected world; the social media world we live in … The opportunity to be human, to speak and interact one-to-one with customers.

So start showing up for your customers.  Get involved.  Get personal.  Share in their excitement.  Recognize.  Act!

Challenge your team to do something out of the ordinary. Give!

Your customers will thank you for it.

Personal interaction is the new era in brand and reputation building.  B2B companies that apply it are succeeding in ways they never expected – proving the old adage: “give, and you shall receive.”

 

Blocked From Blogging? Create a “Non-blog” Blog Instead

There’s a lot B2B companies should like about blogging when it comes to raising awareness of their companies and delivering customers.

Consider the following eye-opening stats courtesy of HubSpot’s “State of Inbound Marketing” report for 2011:

  • 57% of companies using blogs reported that they acquired customers from leads generated directly from their blog.
  • Businesses are increasingly aware their blog is highly valuable: 85% of businesses rated their company blogs as useful, important or critical. 27% rated their company blog as critical to their business.
  • Businesses are now in the minority if they do not blog. From 2009 to 2011, the percentage of businesses with a blog grew from 48% to 65%.

 

The writing on the wall as to how blogging could serve your business is so big that Mr. Magoo couldn’t miss it.

To be sure, not all companies need a blog nor should they if they can’t marshal the time and resources to make it good.

But then there are those enterprises that understand enough about social media to go as far as to create social media policies to ensure everyone understands that engagement isn’t allowed.

They have their reasons, some real, some imagined. Compared to many other industries, social media engagement for highly regulated industries, such as financial, pharmaceutical and law, is more of an involved undertaking.

If you work in one of these segments, is developing and sharing content out of bounds for you? The answer, thankfully, is no.

One of the huge benefits of blogging is increased traffic. Search engines rank more highly those websites that offer users regularly updated content. Consistent updating brings search engine spiders to your website frequently, resulting in an increased number of crawls, which in turn increases the number of citations on Google, which means more people could find your business.

But you don’t automatically need a proper blog to deliver targeted, helpful and educational content to your prospects. Blogging platforms make this regular addition of new content easy. They’re designed for it. But even with outreach limitations, you can still build better organic search results with a simple alternative: a non-blog blog.

A non-blog blog is single page of a website altered every week to include a new piece of content, along with an additional page to archive previous weeks’ posts. Here’s what you need to get started.

      • Gain permission to post previously corporate-approved and publically available content. There is nothing controversial about sharing what has already been approved by your legal department
      • Take stock of available content, such as white papers, reports, educational materials, videos, podcasts, etc.  Also, ferret out all related stories occurring within your industry.
      • Revise the page’s layout to include copy that explains what visitors will see on the page and why you are providing it. If you have a rationale, share it.
      • Set up your weekly content portion of the page so it is easily distinguishable from the rest of the page’s content.

 

Now, for a quick note of caution about limitations. First, don’t get too fancy with the page and don’t work to alter the primary navigation. That won’t go over well with the corporate Webmaster. What is limiting about this approach is that it will take the Webmaster time to update the page.  He or she is likely stretched thin.

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re thinking, “Just how effective could this be?”

Plenty.

For one of our clients, we altered its portion of a huge large corporate site to mimic a blog using this very approach, encompassing a piece of new content every two weeks (yep, busy Webmaster), such as existing articles, podcasts and curated information. You can read how that turned out here.

Spreading your content, while adhering to company policy and without running afoul of industry regulations, is possible with some imagination and a little hustle. Obstacles to social engagement can be overcome. After all, bureaucracy is the art of making the possible, impossible.

 

 

 

 

Why Good Content is Your “Social Annuity”

Just how valuable is the content you create? That depends. Are you writing derivative, uninspired, directionless crud that simply supplies words on a page? Or do you have a trajectory of thought that is meant to enlighten, persuade, educate and sometimes even delight?  In other words, what is the point of your engagement?

There’s no escaping what sharp marketers already know: the power of creating good content can’t be over emphasized. If it delivers information of value to your prospects and optimized correctly, it will be accessed and read repeatedly.

Think of it as your “social annuity”.

This recurring access is similar to a financial annuity. In its simplest form, you hand over a lump of your savings to the financial institution of your choice, and it sends you a monthly payment for the rest of your life.

Just as investors use these simple instruments to supply a consistent flow of cash over time, the content you commit to the web does the exact same thing. As your content is crawled and indexed, it’s committed to a server, ready to be tapped by whoever is clicking in the right keywords to find it.

What’s the primary benefit of a “social annuity”? It has staying power. Unlike ephemeral advertising (and no, I’m not smacking advertising; it has its place in integrated marketing), content sticks around and keeps on producing. But unlike the lump sum of the financial kind, the more content you add, the potential for the return grows and compounds. What you create for your website or blog has a long shelf life at a very low cost. More content leads to more traffic and engagement online.

Marcus Sheridan (and if you don’t know Marcus, you really should) recently showed how just eight blog posts he wrote for his pool company are still grabbing page views months and years after being published. Sure, page views is just a measurement… but so is the money those eight posts help deliver. Marcus estimates that they earned his company about $2 million in revenue. Yes, you read that correctly. And they’re still there, bringing in eyeballs and eventually open checkbooks.

Marcus knows what you should know. Understanding who your audience is, where they are and what keywords they’ll respond to, will draw them to good content. To your content.  And to your company, and your product.  You can take that one valuable investment to the bank.