Social Media on my Mobile Phone (top row)

April 17, 2012 3 Comments

This week’s tool is actually several tools that I use on my mobile phone to manage my social media life for me – and for my clients. Many you may recognize, but others you may not. Believe it or not, before they worked with me, some of my clients think they need to go to the website of the social media service to manage them, and explaining how I use them may help others understand how they could better use them – or share how they use them so I can be better at what I do.

NOTE: All of these applications are free to use. I am currently using an iPhone 4s, but all of these applications are available for the Android – and may even be better on the Android that on the iPhone. These are my top row. I’ll be posting the rest on future Tuesdays.

social mobile on my phone top row Social Media on my Mobile Phone (top row)

Google+- I use Google+ to post to Google+, to find interesting things that I might share on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and to upload interesting photos I find or take. Mostly a consumption application, though occasionally I will post something from the mobile application – or at least I can re-share the good stuff. You need a Google account to use this application.

LinkedIn – I use LinkedIn for finding connections in common, for accepting LinkedIn requests and for responding to e-mails people send using LinkedIn. I do NOT decline connection requests via the mobile app (unless it’s an obvious spammer). Seldom do I make connection requests. Reason: I like to reply to those I don’t know who send me LinkedIn invites and find out how I might know them – or how we might benefit each other. I don’t make connection requests because I can’t personalize the invitation – and I don’t want anyone (even if they know me SUPER well) to think I’m a spammer!

Facebook – Great for managing my personal profile, accepting friend requests, managing a group and replying to Facebook messages. Can be a challenge to manage my client’s pages, as I’m never sure if I’m logged in as the page or as me – and I normally need to be logged in as my client if I’ll be posting on their wall.

Foursquare – I like Foursquare a lot, as it helps me see where my friends are, helps me explore neighborhoods I’m unfamiliar with, and allows me to stay connected to my friends and clients and show them how they could use it for their businesses. I also try to upload photos of locations I’m at or people I am with. I don’t post everywhere I check in to Twitter or Facebook but I do post some pictures and some check-ins if I’m trying to build buzz for a location or if I’m going to say something I think may be helpful to others.

YOUR TURN: How would YOU use these 4 tools for your small business social media efforts?

Help Customers with Referrals and Build Customer Loyalty

April 16, 2012 2 Comments

Guest author Brad Shorr has agency, in-house, and entrepreneurial marketing experience. He writes frequently about social media, SEO, content strategy, and other business issues of interest to small and midsized companies. He lives in the Chicago area and has been blogging since 2005.

Fotolia 20359193 Subscription XL 1 Help Customers with Referrals and Build Customer LoyaltyMany a small business strives to “go the extra mile” for customers … but finding ways to put that promise into action is not always easy. One thing that’s been very successful for me is going the extra mile to give customers referrals, to connect them with people who can help with business and non-business related issues.

Now, this is an obvious networking technique and most entrepreneurs use it every day — but the focus is usually on lead generation: I’ll get Sally in touch with a bank that will help her with her mortgage loan, in the hope that Sally will refer one of her clients to me; that sort of thing. This is a powerful form of networking, because if my bank is instrumental in getting Sally her dream house, she won’t soon forget it.

Great networkers (like the host of this blog, Phil) are always on the lookout for referral possibilities. And while directing this activity to potential lead reciprocators, we should never forget to do the same thing for our customers. Unfortunately, this is something we often do forget.

Suppose you’re in the copywriting business and you connect a client with an attorney who helps her out of a serious legal jam. Do you think that client will abandon you to save a few dollars on the next project? Chances are, the client will never want to abandon you for any reason. We know that people have long memories when they’re wronged. But let’s not forget: we also have long memories when we are helped, especially when help comes from an unexpected source.

Ideas for Cultivating the Ability to Make Referrals

Get to know your customers. It’s important to maintain boundaries, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to clients on a personal basis. If you know Bill loves French cuisine, you can recommend an awesome restaurant. If you know Mary has a son trying to get into a top university, you can arrange to have one of your friends — who happens to be an alum — write a letter of recommendation.

Learn what your friends and connections really do. It’s one thing to know your friend Joe works in real estate. It’s another thing to know that Joe specializes in helping first-time home buyers find high quality, low-risk foreclosure properties ready for move-in. If you don’t know what your connections do, your ability to refer them intelligently is next to zero — and giving a customer a bad or inappropriate referral is worse than not providing one at all.

Follow up after the referral. After you facilitate a connection, ask your customer and the referrer how things worked out. Number one, it shows genuine interest, which never hurts. Number two, the feedback will help you match people up even better in the future … or prevent you from repeating a mistake. Finally, staying involved may open up the opportunity to make another referral. For instance, maybe Real Estate Joe helped your client find the perfect home, and the client now needs the perfect banker, who happens to be someone you know!

Over to You

Do you have any tips for making referrals to customers? Have you had any success stories you’d like to share?

Note — Brad works for Straight North, a Web development, Chicago-based agency. They have a very wide variety of small and midsize clients, including aluminum fabricators and a company for booking tee times online.

(Image Credit — © iQoncept – Fotolia.com)

Behind the Scenes of Walk for the Cure(@Scleroderma Foundation)

April 14, 2012 4 Comments

NOTE from Phil: Recently I was made aware of “Walk for the Cure” social media program, and I was very intrigued by it. Many of the lessons and things they are doing are things that you can use as a small businesses owner to raise awareness for your business. And it’s for a GREAT cause. So I asked to interview one of the linchpins behind the program, Brian Adams. While it is one of the longer interviews I’ve done, it also has some of the best lessons shared for a digital and social campaign, and is very instructive for all of us.

walk for a cure 300x221 Behind the Scenes of Walk for the Cure(@Scleroderma Foundation)

Phil: Tell us about your cool social media program for the Walk for the Cure?

Brian: WalkforCure.org is a user-friendly video sharing site for the Scleroderma Foundation and the larger scleroderma community.  The site’s “call to action” is to have our patients, members, and supporters upload videos telling us “why they walk”, why they participate in the Scleroderma Foundation’s “Stepping Out to Cure” walkathons.

There are a few key items that make the website special:
1) the website is setup to allow for social sharing from every page and post, and,
2) we actually removed the standard blog/website commenting section, and focused the comments completely on the Facebook commenting form to encourage social sharing.  We designed the post comment counter section to reflect the number of shares and likes the videos have through social media channels.

The power of the decision is illustrated by Christina’s promo video which has acquired over 100 shares.  We have found that our participants are tracking their shares and sharing more to increase their numbers.

Phil: How did you come up with the idea? How far up the organization did you have to get approval to make the idea a reality?

Brian: The original idea came out of a brainstorming session between Brian R. Adams (SoCal Chapter) and Stephen Williams (San Diego Chapter) who were both looking to try something new and exciting for 2012.  Brian had worked with Craig at OrgSpring before on a social advocacy campaign and quickly got him involved to work on implementation.

Once there was a working sandbox website with functionality, we presented the idea to CEO Robert Riggs and Christina Relacion, the Foundation’s communications manager,for their feedback.  We were all able to tweak the site together and the collaboration vastly improved the site.  Soon after, the National Office signed on.

As you know, the site is all about sharing video stories and raising scleroderma awareness. We were delighted when Robert and Christina shot their own videos with a very special message for our supporters.  It was a very heartfelt message and shows the dedication the Foundation has to people with scleroderma and their families.

Phil: Who is “running” the campaign?


Brian: The campaign is being jointly managed by the Southern California Chapter and OrgSpring, but we hope to implement a committee approach in the near future.  We each promote the site through our joint and individual social media channels. OrgSpring hosts and maintains the website for us, makes sure all the video posts are formatted and working correctly, and monitors our social media engagements and website analytics.

National helps the campaign with marketing and coordinating the other chapters, as well as donation processing.

It’s a true team effort and a model for a way national foundations can work with their chapter affiliates.

Phil: What is your investment in the campaign (time, money, others in the organization, etc.) and how are you measuring your return on your investments (ROI)?

Brian: The initial investment was predominantly one of time and energy, developing the idea, getting buy-in from national and other local chapters. That process took just over a month.  Then we invested capital for the development and maintenance of the actual website. Overall, we estimate the capital investment to be approximately over $7,000 for the campaign, which runs through mid October.

We feel we already have gotten a huge ROI on this investment: OrgSpring helped us apply for the Google Grants program and we were quickly accepted. The Google Grant program has become an essential part of the campaign since the website is so heavily focused on video sharing on Youtube.  Through the Google Grants program we were able to get an enhanced YouTube page to process donations through Google Checkout, and the ability to place annotations, call to action overlays and links inside our videos – which drives traffic back to the site and directly to our donate pages.

Additionally, Google Grants gives us the ability to run a keyword specific Google adwords campaign with up to $10,000 per month in advertising dollars donated in-kind from Google.  Thank you Google.

With OrgSpring, we’ve developed a monitoring program which analyzes several metrics:

Awareness and Donations: Our initial goal is to raise awareness of the Foundation and scleroderma, and to increase involvement with our walk-a-thons happening across the country over the next six months. Our secondary goal is to drive an online donation campaign which will support the national foundation and individual chapter efforts.

We measure those two goals in very specific ways:

In relation to awareness, we measure the increase of stories and articles written about scleroderma and the foundation. Our baseline was determined to be the average number of stories written about the organization per month leading up to the launch of the WalkforCure.org site. Over the next few months, we’ll measure the increased (hopefully) news items, new fans and followers in social media channels, forum comments, website signups, and the number of people who are signed up for our walks.

We’re also tracking where those stories show up.  Until now, most of the larger stories of scleroderma are based in the medical and research journals, as is the case with most rare diseases.  We’re trying to bring scleroderma awareness to the masses, so an increase in coverage on more mainstream media channels will be considered a success for us.

For donations, the measurement is a bit simpler.  We can track exactly how much money is donated through the walk website.  Having said that, this campaign has never been about raising money, as we consider raising scleroderma awareness a key part of our mission.

What’s tougher to measure is the increased goodwill that our individual chapters will see from this promotional website. People who visit the website will be able visit individual chapter websites and get involved on that local level.  Once that happens it can be hard to keep track of additional donations made to the individual chapters. Rather than try to collect that data from every chapter, a few chapters have elected to share that information with us on a regular basis so we can determine whether the campaign is effectively increasing their volunteer and donation base as well.

We also expect to see a bump in walk-a-thon sign ups, which should also lead to increased financial support directly at the events.

We have planned surveys that will go out to our membership at regular intervals during the campaign to gauge awareness and level of interaction with the site, and also to provide feedback on how to make the site better.

Perhaps the most important result, but the least measurable, is the empowerment our members feel sharing their voice and stories.  The message we have received from the people who have already made videos are very inspiring and make this campaign already well worth the effort.

Phil: What’s been the biggest “aha” so far in the program?

Brian: I think we all have had our own individual AHA moment during this campaign- for me, Brian, it was realizing the joy and sense of empowerment our members were getting from the campaign.  I think this was due to mainly to the fact that we were asking them to give us our message, not the only way around.  We empowered them to share their voice and they empowered us to work harder and spread the word.  We gave our people with scleroderma a platform and they then gave the platform meaning.

Phil: Anything else you want to share?

Brian: I would be remiss not to mention that we enlisted Karen Vasquez (a woman with scleroderma) to manage our dedicated Twitter account @WalkforCure.  Karen has fire in her belly, a tireless work ethic and a great sense of humor.  Having her be one of the Twitter voices of our campaign (the other being Christina at National @scleroderma) has been beneficial and, again, in keeping with our mission.  Watching Karen blog on the site and tweet is like watching someone come into their own and we are very proud of her involvement and look forward to see where she goes next.

Phil: OK, one more question: What else should we know about your organization and how we can get more involved?

Brian: People should visit www.WalkforCure.org and www.scleroderma.org to learn about the site and learn about scleroderma (respectively).  We hope they like us on Facebook (facebook.com/walkforcure) or Twitter @WalkforCure) and we love feedback so I hope they RT and comment on all our items.

We are in need of more people to Tweet, blog and post for us, so if someone is looking for a fun and creative way to help a good cause, this is the place.

They can email me at badams@sclerodermasocal.org or call (310) 287-0793.

Phil: Thanks for being so open and sharing so much Brian!

So if you want to get more involved or even just learn more, get in touch with Brian, or watch one of these 3 helpful videos:

YOUR TURN: What was most helpful about this? Most confusing? How will you be implementing this in your business?

Creative Ways to Enhance Your E-mail Newsletter

April 13, 2012 1 Comment

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Stephen P Smith:

Last week I wrote about some Creative Ways to Use Foursquare and one of the tips was to add a Foursquare feature to your e-mail newsletter:

Introduce your customers to each other. Add a “Recent Foursquare Check-ins” feature to your e-mail newsletter (you do have a newsletter, don’t you?). On your “Manager Tools” page there is a list of Top and Most Recent Check-ins that you can copy-and-paste right into your newsletter – with links to those users’ profiles! (You will have to do a little editing…) Encourage your readers to connect with each other, and remember that you should be connecting with your customers as well.

newspaper 300x100 Creative Ways to Enhance Your E mail NewsletterThere are many other ways that you can make your newsletter more interesting, more engaging, and more share-able. These are a few of my top tips:

  • Pictures – If you aren’t using images in your email newsletter you are missing out on a fantastic opportunity to showcase your products. While not everyone has an email client configured to display images you can definitely achieve more impact upon those that do. Share pictures of your new products, of customers using your products, of your place of business. Pictures add to the story of your business and make it more real.
  • Employees – Do you have an employee appreciation program of some sort? Share it with your customers in the newsletter. Share their accomplishments, awards, certifications, community service – whatever it is that makes your employees so special.
  • Customers – You can showcase some of your customers just like you would your staff, by featuring their accomplishments, awards and civic involvement. If you see that one of your customers is in the news for a donation to a charity or some other positive community action be sure to share it, and ask your readers to let you know about any of their activities that they would like for you to share with your business’ audience.  This can be a very powerful engagement tool.

Can you think of any other creative ways to transform your newsletter into something that your subscribers will actually look forward to receiving? Share your ideas in the Comments.

twitter icon 02012 150x150 Creative Ways to Enhance Your E mail Newsletter

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About the author: Stephen Smith teaches Productivity and Social Media Literacy skills at In Context MultiMedia. He will be publishing a compilation of best practices based on his popular Weekly Letter in May 2012.

You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

I’ll Tungle For Ya – Scheduling Made Simple

April 10, 2012 14 Comments

One of the things I miss about corporate America is the ability in real time to book appointments with people who want to work with me. It was easy because we were all on the same e-mail and calendar platform, I could see anytime, anywhere, when people had time to meet, and I could request a meeting simply and easily.

When I went full-time in my own small business, I didn’t have the luxury (or the capital) to set up a full-blown calendaring solution for me – and even if I had the money and the time, it wouldn’t have worked for scheduling meetings with my clients who were not on the same servers as I was.

tungle logo Ill Tungle For Ya Scheduling Made Simple

Enter Tungle – an even better tool than what I had in corporate America.

It’s simple – you just sign up for a Tungle account (http://tungle.me), synchronize your calendar, then you share your Tungle URL with people who want to book your time.

Simple – easy and painless. And it’s free.

Tungle’s website has 3 things they tout – and they work great!

1) Share your calendar so people can book it – without sharing details

2) Reply to meeting requests and send invitations from your mobile device.

3) Synchronize the calendar you’re already using with Tungle so you can have 1 up-to-date calendar – and so you don’t get double booked.

If you’ve had trouble getting meetings and appointments scheduled with your customers and potential customers, give Tungle a try.

If you want to see my calendar in action, check out http://tungle.me/philgerb

YOUR TURN: What’s your biggest challenge scheduling? What other calendaring program do you use to help you overcome this problem?