It would seem like a no-brainer that going the extra distance to really listen to what your customer wants and delivering it is good for business, right? Still, really listening to customers is a skill that a lot of businesses seem to have forgotten.

Recently I bought a trailer for my horse and my Jeep just didn’t have the horsepower to pull it, so we went looking for a bigger SUV. Something used and in good enough condition I won’t have to worry about it out on the back country roads where I’ll be riding or heading to Tahoe for a family getaway. We visited half a dozen dealerships. We did a few test drives but none were the perfect fit for all the needs of our family.

Not one sales person offered to keep in touch and let us know if something came on the lot that was a good fit. When I suggested it a couple of times the salesman looked at me like I was an alien. They didn’t even ask questions about what we wanted, just how much we could spend and tried to make a deal on whatever cars it  they had in stock. It was all about the immediate sale.

We did some searches online and found a truck that looked good at the Gilroy Auto Outlet (about 30 miles from our house) and drove down to look at it. It was close, but still didn’t have some of the features we wanted. Imagine my shock when the sales manager, Jeff Buich, started to ask us questions about what we were looking for! Not only did he ask questions, he took notes, gave us his card and offered to let us know if something came on the lot.

A week later Jeff called with a truck for us to look at. He’d searched partner dealerships for a car that fit our needs and had it brought to the lot, ran it through a safety check, detailed it and had it ready for sale. Although that first vehicle didn’t work, he asked more questions and found a second one that was spot on perfect. It had every one of the “important” details we were looking for, the mileage AND price we requested.

THAT my friends is the epitome of service. He listened, he listened again and he delivered exactly what we wanted. Was I a difficult customer to please? Yep. Am I a customer of his for life? Probably, and I’ll tell everyone I know looking for a car that it’s well worth it to head to Gilroy and see Jeff.

What’s the lesson?
In my little search I met a lot of salespeople. I saw a lot of sales strategies ranging from “you’ll never find what you want you should settle for this” to “I’ll cut you such a deal that you’ll start to like this car after all”. I’m a salesperson too, and I’m not an easy sale, but I truly appreciate a salesman who is about service first. Attention to the customer must be job one if you want my business.

2 Questions to ask yourself about your sales techniques

How do you treat your customers?
Do you sell them what you think they want or do you listen to what they need first?

Are you about the one-time sale on the life-long customer?
Sure you can sell some people a car they really didn’t want if you make the deal sweet enough, but eventually they just might resent you for it. Do you want them to tell their friends you sold them a car they really didn’t want or that you gave them great service AND a great deal?

Follow through!
Lots of salespeople looked at us as a one-time sale and if we didn’t buy right away they just moved on to the next one. How many deals are you leaving on the table because you’re in a rush to get to the next sale? Do your buyers come back and like your Facebook page or do they take the dealer plate holder off as soon as they get home?

Online or offline?
Here’s the thing about social media (I know, you were wondering when I was going to get there);

.You can use all the social media you want to get people in the door, and it’s great at that, but if you don’t make the sale don’t blame social media, cuz social media doesn’t make sales, people do. One instant sale isn’t going to get you rave reviews like this one.

We tend to create the social media presence for our businesses in an organic fashion, which is the natural way to grow relationships right? New tools pop up we just HAVE  to try, or our network of connections asks us to join a new network in order to communicate with them.

The problem is; as you explore new tools and meet new people who invite you to join them on other networks, your messaging and your social media presence overall can easily get confused.

That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a social media audit every so often to step back and get a 10K foot level. This allows you to see yourself as others might see you and judge if you are delivering the message you think you’re sending.

It’s also a good way to evaluate what networks are working for you, which aren’t and if you are using social media efficiently.

With my own coaching clients, social media audits are done quarterly as a regular part of the social media team’s outreach, but frankly most companies are doing really well if they do a social audit once a year, if at all.

What we’ve pulled together for you here is a downloadable workbook to use to do your own social media audit based on what I’ve learned coaching companies large and small about social media. I guarantee you will have a much clearer picture of how the rest of the world sees your social media outreach efforts and it’s very likely to  surprise you!

With each section in the workbook you’ll find tips to make your next audit easier, fine-tune your social media outreach to make it more efficient and do a little network spring cleaning to boot!

Ready to do your own social media audit? Get the ebook and get started! We tend to create our social media presence in an organic fashion, which is the natural way to grow relationships right?

The problem is; as you explore new tools and meet new people who invite you to join them on other networks, your messaging and your social media presence overall can easily get confused.

That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a social media audit every so often to step back and get a 10K foot level. This allows you to see yourself as others might see you and judge if you are delivering the message you think you’re sending.

It’s also a good way to evaluate what networks are working for you, which aren’t and if you are working efficiently.

With my own clients, social media audits are done quarterly as a regular part of the social media team’s outreach, but frankly most companies are doing really well if they do a social audit once a year, if at all.

What we’ve pulled together for you here is a downloadable workbook to use to do your own social media audit based on what I’ve learned coaching companies large and small about social media. I guarantee you will have a much clearer picture of how the rest of the world sees your social media outreach efforts and it’s very likely to  surprise you!

With each section in the workbook you’ll find tips to make your next audit easier, fine-tune your social media outreach to make it more efficient and do a little network spring cleaning to boot!

Ready to do your own social media audit? Get the ebook and get started!

I talk to nonprofits about various aspects of social media just about every day. By and large people get the value of building community around their cause. They get the relatively manageable expense of leveraging social media to raise visibility for their nonprofit, find funders, advocates, and  volunteers when compared to more traditional marketing channels. They WANT to use social media effectively. They know it works and they’ve seen the success cases.

So what’s stopping them from diving in? Two things are the biggest issues.
1. The learning curve to get up to speed on the latest techniques and networks
2. The time it takes to learn it, implement it and see the value delivered.

This is especially true for the small to mid-size nonprofit who may have a 1-2 person marketing team, some eager interns and volunteers but not quite enough direction to pull a comprehensive strategy together. Everybody is stretched thin and there just isn’t enough time in the day for “all that social media stuff”.

I want to share with you some of the ways we organize our social media teams at Tatu Digital Media when we are working with clients. Some of the tricks of the trade that help manage a social media engagement plan with a small team. How to pull together an editorial calendar, a social media schedule and decide what social networks are the best use of your bandwidth. Where to get help creating content and what you can actually automate without risking your relationships. How to set up listening tools to do a lot of the work for you.

I’m doing a free webinar on May 30,2012 at 1 PM PST. for nonprofits of all sizes, free of charge and sponsored by my friends at My Dutch Uncle, who provide business services for nonprofits.

I’ll be joined by their Social Media Czar Spencer Doyle, and we’ll talk about increasing the efficiency of your  social  outreach so you can get on with the business of your nonprofit!

Fill in the form now to register for the one-hour webinar.

Many Facebook page owners are disappointed with the results they are getting from their Facebook pages. Why? Sometimes because they think they’ll put up a page and their fan base will flock to the site, dynamically post content on their own and discuss it with their peers, all without much effort from the community manager (if there is one).

Hooey. This just doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a vibrant community and are expanding it to Facebook.

So what do you do?

1. Quit broadcasting
   If you tell me everything I need to know through your Facebook page, and it reads like your email newsletter, then that’s all I’m going to do. Scan it, extract information and move on.
2. Quit marketing
   If I feel like you’re streaming ads to me and calling it interaction I’m going to tune you out. I may scan the headline in my newsfeed, but unless there’s a hook to something for me, I’m not going to read further. I want to be talked TO not AT.
3. Find out who I am
   Did you ever go look to see who someone was after they fanned your Facebook page? I’m guessing that less than 5%  of page owners, and maybe 50% of community managers would answer yes. What a missed opportunity to learn more about your market, what they like, and what value they might be able to add to your Facebook community!
4. Like me back
   Let’s say you sell photography equipment. Wouldn’t it be useful to you to know if your fans are photographers? What if you not only liked my Facebook page but shared my work on your page? What if you made a comment on my photo about how beautiful it was? I’d be grateful. I’d tell my friends. I might even buy something.
5. Give me something to do
   Photos and videos make us think, or laugh, encourage us to add a comment and share with our friends. Give me a poll (that isn’t a focus group question and I’ll give you my opinion.
6. Gimme respect
   Show enough respect to your fans to say please and thank you. To ask opinions and respect the answers. To feature case studies or examples of real people who have impacted you, your product or the world.
7. Rinse, repeat
   Doing all of the above once is not enough. You’ve got to do it over and over until it’s a part of your natural work-flow. The miracle happens when it’s no longer “work” but fun!

A client contacted me this morning, upset because her “reach” seems to be  seriously declining on Facebook. For some reason Facebook chooses Reach to be the metric graphed on the insights page, and it’s little understood, so here’s the long and the short of it.

 Here’s how Facebook defines reach
“The reach chart shows how many people have seen any content about your Page, and where applicable, whether these people were reached through an organic, paid or viral channel. People might see your content through more than one of these channels. As a result, the sum of your organic, paid and viral reach might be larger than your total Page reach.

• Organic reach is the number of unique people, fans or non-fans, who saw any content about your Page in their News Feed, Ticker or on your Page.
•  Paid reach is the number of unique people who saw an ad or Sponsored Story that pointed to your Page.
•  Viral reach is the number of unique people who saw this post from a story published by a friend.”

The problem is, the “reach” graph in your Facebook Insights combines all 3, Paid, Viral and Organic reach. So let’s say you run some “story” ads. The reach from those ads is included in your overall reach. When your ads reach your set funds limit or you quit running ads, your reach may drop significantly.

Another consideration is how the metrics of each individual fan affects the reach too
For example; if you have 10 fans who each have 100 friends then their reach is considerably lower than another page with 3 fans who each have 1,000 fans. So basically if you want to inflate your “reach” you just have to attract fans with big friends lists. Even if they don’t engage, your reach goes up. How bogus is that?

 Basically reach doesn’t have a whole lot to do with how effective you are at engaging your fans 
As you can see from the chart above, not only are they getting more engagement on this page, and the page reach (5,636,087) is increasing slightly AND the “people talking about this” is awesome, all the client sees at first glance is that downhill slump of the reach. To me it seems like a marketing ploy to put the reach as the one big graph in your “insights” tab and not the “people talking about” tab.

Why am I suspicious?
Isn’t it interesting that so many people are complaining about their reach dropping and Facebook coes out with the “Reach Generator”? This little tool is available only to “qualified accounts” who are then guaranteed that their content will be seen by 75% of their fan base. Not the paltry 16% that most pages get on a good day, but 75%!!

Wow. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get that?

This is from the Facebook doc on the reach generator. Download it here.

Unless you’re a big brand I’m guessing you can’t afford to pay to have this much showing, so you’d better think about how to really engage people.

Bottom line?
Quit worrying about reach and worry instead about engagement. I’ll be writing a post about how to get real engagement from your fan base later this week, so stay tuned for that, but really, forget about reach. It means very little.

Part of what I do as a social media coach is help businesses large and small manage their facebook pages.Our social media management team is frequently asked to go to a client’s event and help live-tweet, take photos or video and post them live during the event to share with their fans. Most of us have iPhones, so we get good pictures, but we can’t upload in batches to a Facebook page from the phone.

Frankly, Facebook’s iPhone app simply sucks at photo management. We can only upload images one by one, which is seriously painful when you’ve got 20-30 images to upload. Besides, it’s just not good practice to flood your Facebook page with too many photos at once. No matter how great the event is, people just don’t want to see them all in their news feed if they’re not in them. Better to wait until you can create an album and then post.

Until now, the only option was to download images to a laptop during the event and frantically upload them to Facebook through the website so you could get back and take more. Ugh. Sometimes the photos don’t get up for days if the client doesn’t have time to deal with it after the event. Ah, but no more. Weaver Mobile has built on their first iPhone app, PhotoBox! to offer a version that allows you to create n

Manage Facebook photos from your iPhone
You can create new albums on Facebook from your iPhone and upload the whole batch at once to Facebook. With PhotoBox! Pro, you can upload to your profile or any page you manage. You can also batch download entire albums and archive them on the spot, edit and re-upload too.

Did I mention editing?
Both versions of the PhotoBox! app offer a nice set of filters you can apply to your Facebook photos including cropping rotation and annotation. The filters are intuitive to use and save you from having to edit them later.

Browse liked pages
The “My Likes” tab now allows you to view all of the photos the pages you’ve liked have uploaded. View them on your iPhone and download the ones you want to save to a folder on your phone, your iPhone album, or a private album on Facebook with a collection of all the photos you’ve liked through PhotoBox!. Download is super-fast and you can view several thousand images, pick the ones you like and download with a click.

Recent Feed
Another feature I like is the ability to view all the images posted recently in my news feed. I have quite a few friends and things fly by in the news feed. Being a visual kind of girl it’s fun to scan the recent uploads from my friends, and then I can save them to a private “liked photos” album on Facebook to view them later, or download them.

Un tagging
With all the uproar in the last few weeks about employers viewing Facebook pages and demanding passwords, it’s good to be able to view all the photos you are tagged in and un tag them easily. Both PhotoBox! apps allow you to easily scan them all on one tab and un-tag with a click.

Weaver Mobile has two great apps here, and I’m not saying that just because they’re a client. I’m thrilled  they are listening to what us page admins really want to see in a Facebook photo management app. This is an app built for people who use Facebook a lot, take lots of photos on their iPhones, and want to work efficiently in the field.

Download the apps and give them a spin. PhotoBox! and PhotoBox! Pro are both available in the iTunes store (sorry, no Android yet, but soon!) Then come back and let me know what you thought!

A recent AP Newswire story tells the tale of one Justin Bassett who was asked by a hiring manager for his user name on Facebook. When she opened the site and saw that his profile was private, she asked him for his password. Bassett refused and withdrew his application, stating that he didn’t want to work for a company that would ask for such personal information.

Apparently this is all too common. Simply doing a search for a social media mention or profile isn’t enough, some companies want to look into your personal posts as well. Even if they don’t ask for your password you can bet an HR person will have googled you and viewed your profiles on Linkedin,Twitter, Facebook and Google+ at the very least. Sometimes they require you to log in during your interview so they can see your profile and be sure you aren’t a hazard to the corporate reputation or a spy for competitors.

Some companies are a bit sneakier than others. Sears for example “allows” job applicants to log into their jobs page with Facebook, Myspace or Linkedin, just to make it convenient for you. Isn’t that nice?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Privacy online is a myth. If you want something to be private, don’t put it online in the first place.

The problem with that model is; you aren’t the only one who might be posting information about you online. Maybe it’s a mention of a great weekend away on a blog, photos on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr, a video on youtube of you being silly. All of these things can easily be taken out of context if it suits the goals of the viewer.

So what to do?

Fake profiles have been used to harass and defame the real account holder many, many times. Check for identity theft on a regular basis. You can even sign up for regular monitoring from sites like Reputation.com

Search for yourself, not just on Google but on Bing and popular social sites. Not everyone uses the most popular sites and there may be information buried out there.

Keep your profiles active and up to date. You want people to find YOU when they do a search, not some lame broken profile or a fake one set up to mock you.

Untag photos on Facebook. Scan tags on popular sites frequently to see what has been tagged with your name.

Download Outspoken Media’s Online Reputation Management Guide for more tips and tricks to keep your reputation squeaky clean.

Personally i think it’s reprehensible for a potential employer to ask for your password or even to ask you to log into a social profile in their presence. But that’s why I am a happily self-employed entrepreneur!

We’ve mostly gotten comfy with the changes to our personal pages when Facebook went to the timeline model, but trust me, that was nothing compared to the changes you’re going to see for business. Let’s face it, the tab system with Pages never really worked, and it was hard to keep those really important posts at the top of your page for long. All that is changing.

I don’t begin to have enough room to do this in a blog post, so I’ve got a handy-dandy free e-book on Facebook Timelines for you to download that will give you lots of details, specific rules to know and ideas about how to make your Facebook timeline really pop.Here are a few highlights for you to think about.

Cover photos

These are what everybody already knows except a bit bigger (850X3You’ve got them on your personal profiles already right? Many marketers have been practically drooling over all that potential ad space too, but Facebook is having none of that.

Cover photos may not contain:

• Calls to action
• Discount offers
• Contact information
• References to “Like” or “Share” your page.

Here’ re the rules on Facebook on covers, and while you are there read the Facebook page terms too. Best to avoid surprises.

Tabs

Applications and custom pages used to live in the “tabs” on the side of your page. It turns out nobody ever went there and now they will be prioritized and even give a little glam with buttons at the top of the page. These can be re-ordered to show what is really important to you. When you click on a tab you’ll have much more real estate to work with too, no more cramming content into a tiny window!

Pinning news

The ability to float a news story or milestone to the top of your page is big. You can “highlight” a post and it floats at the top of your page for as long as a week.

The timeline

The timeline has a whole new meaning for businesses and especially for nonprofits. Here you can tell your story, highlight key events and even make some of those milestones stand out by making them show across the whole page. I love what pages like Doctors Without Borders and Ford did with their timelines to tell a compelling story. Go take a look and see how you could use these ideas to tell your story.








Then come back here and get the Facebook Timeline For Business e-book. It’s packed with information including specific details on dimensions and the rules of the new road on Facebook!

I admit I’m a little behind with this post. Everybody and their cousin Sally has already written a post on Pinterest by now. Its’s the media darling of the day. Or at least it was. Then we actually read the terms of use and some people are already deleting their accounts in protest. See, it turns out that not only does the TOU state “Cold Brew Labs and its licensors exclusively own all right, title and interest in and to the Site, Application, Services and Site Content, including all associated intellectual property rights”, (that means the pins you post too!) but Pinterest is apparently adding affiliate links to some of the posts to earn money when you click on the links. On top of that their sign-up process is really designed to “automatically” build your following by notifying your entire list of connections that you’ve joined and suggesting they follow you. Smart eh? That’s why you are suddenly getting tons of emails from Pinterest.

Hmm. In this day and age, transparency is hugely important and this wasn’t cool. The digerati who are up in arms about the TOS. But when all is said and done though, does the user base care? The market is collectors and mostly women, who like to curate collections of images around things they like. I’m willing to be they could care less if Pinterest makes money from affiliate links on their collections as long as they are free to curate more. As for the emails, either filter them into a mailbox or change your email settings on Pinterest.

How is business using Pinterest?
Now see, that’s the interesting thing. Because it’s all the rage businesses rushed to figure out how to leverage Pinterest’s incredible popularity to get people talking about their business and there are some very creative uses by brands large and small alike, as well as nonprofits.

Which businesses do well on Pinterest?
Clearly interior design, food and infographics are doing really well here, but it’s really all over the map. Here’s a board of Fashion Brands on Pinterest and another for the America Heart Association. Here’s one just for the boys, er, men, called Board of Man. Even the National Guard has gotten into the act. Just do a search for what you do and you’re likely to find some boards built around it.

Start with a core group of pins and then drip them in over time
Remember that as more users follow your boards you have an opportunity to remind them of your existence every time you post a new pin. If you post a dozen pins at once they get a dozen emails at once. Once a day is probably a more tolerable noise level for most. Just like with Twitter it’s better to spread out your shares rather than inundating us with them all at once.

Create boards that are different
We do not need another board all about cupcakes. We don’t really. Do something to make your board stand out from the crowd. Here’s a fun way to do it by slicing up images for a single board, similar to what people have done with Google+ photos.Post items that are shareable. (DUH)

Think of ways to pin on a schedule
It trains your users to expect a great pin from you every day and they begin to look forward to it. Can you have a theme for every day of the week, or even weekly that keeps people interested?

Name your boards with SEO in mind
While we have very little demographic data about our boards it’s clearly showing up in search engines too. Create your board title with SEO in mind. “My board” doesn’t mean a thing. “Hot Cars” is clear and much more likely to both gain interest from users and seo form the search engines. What will people search for to find you? Select a category for your board that is appropriate to your purpose in pinning. Fill out the description with keywords in a complete sentence.

Follow other pinners
Follow the people who are most popular in your areas of interest. Most likely they’ll follow you back. It’s super easy for people to click that “follow JFouts’s back” and they are following all of your boards. This is important. Let’s say you are in the wine industry and you’ve created boards for sustainable wine making, your wines, Sonoma valley travel and wine accessories. When someone follows all your boards they get a bigger picture of who you are and when you post your new labels or the latest vintage, they see that too.

Collaborate
When you find an influencer you are impressed with invite them to collaborate on a board. To do that you just create a board, then go to edit and choose “Me + Contributors” under who can pin. This will allow you to invite influencers in your area of interest, people who have a complementary viewpoint, etc.

Be social
Pinboard is boring if nobody comes to your party. Re-pin great finds from other boards. It’s good for them and it’s good for you. It’s likely they will reciprocate and may even invite you to collaborate. Go see who the people are who like or re-pin your posts. Follow them, re-pin something of theirs. Reciprocation is the core of social interaction. Ph, and of course don’t forget to share your pins on social networks, add the Pinit button to your blog and maybe even add a widget with your recent pins to let people see what is important to you.

I spoke recently to a group of PR and marketing professionals about how to use social media in their work. One woman told me that she was trying to get the CXO’s to use social media as part of their brand awareness. She’d send them emails with links to blogs they could comment on, tweets for their information, etc. They were ignoring her. Several other people in the room commented they had similar issues. One said her CEO simply said, “That’s what I pay you for, you do it for me.”

She doesn’t and she’s right. Any Marketer worth her salt knows that pretending to be the CEO and writing tweets–god forbid commenting as– the CEO is social media poison. If and when it comes out that it’s not really the CEO but a marketing person it’s going to be ugly.

I’ve seen this a lot in corporate trainings. CXO’s are busy. If they’re not up to speed on how to use social media they won’t adopt. It reduces the marketing or PR professional to an annoying mosquito who keeps bugging them and those emails with all that great info go straight to the trash.

How do you deal with the CXO who won’t make time to learn how to use social media?
Instead of trying to address this in a Chinese water torture fashion where you are constantly dripping “great opportunities” on their heads, do your homework and build a presentation for the C-suite. Get them all together in one place and show them the impact they could have if they were only engaged.

• Do some searches and pull metrics to show the impact of a positive social media outreach from a CXO level. Then show them some data on a social media nightmare story that could have been better handled through social media.
• Show them some numbers on how the C-suite is using social media effectively.
• Find you biggest competitor and show what their social media presence looks like. Either they’re doing it well and it’s a challenge to attack, or if they’re not doing it either it’s a window of opportunity to be there first!
• Find their peer group and show them what they are missing, how they could use social media as a collaboration tool and for professional development.
• Let them understand you’re not asking them to spend all day on social networks and that training is available to help them learn the right way to engage if they need it.

But I don’t have time for this!
There are lots of ways to use social media efficiently. I’m not saying you have to get the CXO on Twitter all day, they’ve got work to do. Give them the tools to work smarter.

• Set up a social listening dashboard, maybe Netvibes so they can quickly scan for important news to share with their networks.
• Set them up with Cotweet or Hootsuite so they can post efficiently and schedule posts out in advance
• Get them an admin or social media manager who can help set up their accounts, do some searches for appropriate connections and information (but NOT pretend to be them).
• Send a daily or weekly update on progress and the impact they are having (atta boy!). Show each CXO and what their Twitter reach is, for example, and then the combined company reach.

If they still aren’t interested?
Fine. Social media is not for everybody. Stop being a mosquito and do what you can around them. Feel free to say I told you so if it makes you feel better, but better yet, just do a kick-ass job and someone will hire you away…..

If they’re interested but you don’t feel qualified to train them?
I’m a social media coach, I do this for a living. Hire me to come in and give them a presentation that will make it very clear how they can use social media, who else in your space is doing either well or poorly, and then train the team how to use social media efficiently and effectively. My success is your success!