Social Media Gold: 1 Daily Habit to Make Your Social Strategy Sparkle

by Carol Schiller on September 12, 2011

computer on a buoy

Pitch in a little each day

Recently, I got an email from a friend with 20+ years of executive-level marketing experience at a large firm. He’s just learning about social media, and asked about Facebook.

Since we had done a very successful post on the Cozi page that day (it garnered over 300 comments and some critical customer insights), I immodestly encouraged him to check it out.

I received this reply:

I could not figure out how to get directly to the post, so I had to wade through a long list from the last 24 hours. Seems like much of what you (Carol) are doing online is providing technical support. Ever think of hiring an intern for $12/hour and training them to provide online technical assistance, so you can spend more of your time on strategic initiatives?

My reply to this is “no”, and here’s why:

1. Some of the best social insights come from customer service

Social media is about listening and talking to people. If you don’t have time to answer customer questions, you probably won’t be very good at social media. This is true on a company level, an executive level and a personal level. It’s also one reason (among many) that so few big companies are truly good at it.

You see, at big companies a few people get paid a lot to plan, and a lot of people get paid a little to execute. So, in a big company context, an hour spent in the customer service trenches by anyone making more than $12 hour feels like a waste of time, brainpower and money.

In truth though, allowing mid and senior level people to remain divorced from customer interaction is a huge minus for everyone. No report can capture the nuance of customer feeling. And failing to understand feelings is how you end up with disasters like the infamous Summer’s Eve Douche ad.

2. You can’t fight to improve what you can’t see.

The concept of continuous improvement was invented by an American named W. Edwards Deming, and social media has made it easier than ever for companies to  continually improve based on feedback. But only if you take the time to listen.

When YOU have to chase down the answer to whatever comes up that day, you start to see every chink in the company’s armor: product, customer service, engineering, logistics, communications. If there is a weakness somewhere, it will be revealed in the hunt for answers.

3. It’s not just about the numbers

Yes, it’s great to have an intern comb all the incoming complaints, questions and issues and put together a spreadsheet for you on which issues are coming up most. But relying purely on reports inevitably dilutes the passion behind the data. It’s a lot easier to say, “Well, that problem only affects a small portion of our users”, when YOU aren’t the one having to tell them there’s no solution to their problem.

Moreover, you get incredible insights into the customer profile from these interactions. (See point #1) Would a smart executive in charge of strategic planning or product development take the time to read transcripts or watch video clips of focus groups? Of course they would. Social media allows you to focus group your customers every day. But only if you show up.

4. The biggest value in customer interactions comes from empowering those who have them

Companies that hire low-level, low-wage kids for EVERY customer-facing task are throwing away huge amounts of value. Only someone with experience and some business depth can pull out the relevant insights, turn them into an action plan and then champion that plan to the executive team. It’s not reasonable to expect the intern who makes $12/hour to deliver this.  The job of the social media lead includes MAKING the time to talk to customers and ensuring that those insights make a positive impact throughout the business.

So the 30 minutes to an hour a day I spend reading and answering customer questions – whether on Facebook., Twitter or the blog — isn’t a waste of my time; it makes me better at my job. Better at understanding our customer, better at developing social strategies that fit their needs and better at building relationships with our most passionate brand advocates. Most importantly it makes me better at delivering usable insights to the Product, Marketing, Sales and Support groups.

Now, do I spend hours every day answering every question myself? Of course not. I let our superb help desk team do the heavy lifting that makes customer support such a unique and valued feature of the Cozi brand. But I don’t for a minute believe that I should be doing something more “strategic” than understanding the customer experience.

So set aside some time each day to really hang out with your customers. Because that is what social media is for. Not for feeling too important to answer a question. But for developing a real, human understanding with thousands if not millions of customers, and USING that relationship to make your company better at serving them.

{ 0 comments }

Crock Pot Girls: 3 Lessons for Social Media Managers

by Carol Schiller on September 8, 2011

The Crock Pot Girls have over a million fans on Facebook

A week ago I got an email from my boss asking if I had heard about the Crock Pot Girls Facebook page. I hadn’t, but I quickly learned 2 things:

  1. They had grown from zero to almost 750,000 fans in just the prior two weeks (today they have well over a million).
  2. There was almost no information on who the founders are or how they did it.

Suddenly, everyone in the marketing group, including my boss, was looking to me to explain what happened.

So, did I sweat and fret and struggle to come up with an explanation that would justify why, as the Social Media Director at Cozi, I hadn’t produced in two years what this page had done in just two weeks? Nope. Here’s why:

  1. Stories like this are the REASON we all have jobs in social media. Just like the David After Dentist YouTube video (now with a staggering 99 million+ views), or the People of Wal-Mart Blog, sometimes stuff just takes off. (Asha Dornfest’s wrote an excellent post highlighting the unpredictability factor in the success of her popular blog, Parenthacks.)
  2. The kind of lightning-in-a bottle represented by the Crock Pot Girls page makes for a useful story in many ways, but at the end of the day, these stories are few and far between for a good reason: Smart social media is a marathon, not a sprint, and the real value only accrues to your company over time.
  3. There has already been some speculation on how they did it, and whether it was driven by black hat techniques. Although the page looked decidedly unkosher when I first checked it out, and several of the people producing anecdotal evidence of foul play are people I trust, there is no doubt that the page now has many thousands of legitimate fans too.  So, do the origins matter to you as a social media manager? Probably not. (Better to let the consultants and agencies worry about that.) Because at the end of the day, your first goal is to build YOUR page and use it to serve your customers better.

The truth is it doesn’t really help you or your business to stress out about how the Crock Pot Girls got there.

See, I do not believe that social media is a zero sum game; If the Crock Pot Girls have a million+ fans, good for them. Their fan count does not in any way prevent you from continuing to benefit from the excellent Facebook page you’ve already built. One that you use to engage your customers, gather product feedback, develop a nuanced understanding of your audience, deliver great product support, and so much more.

And if your page is NOT doing all those things for your company, the last thing you want to do is spend your time worrying about someone ELSE’s fan count.

But wait! What if you have a crock pot or recipe fan page and website? Isn’t it a zero sum game then? Aren’t they stealing all your customers’ eyeballs?

I have good news for you: If they actually do a good job and make that Crock Pot Girls page super engaging, then they aren’t stealing your customers from you, they are AGGREGATING them for you. You now have the ideal place to park your limited marketing dollars in the form of a super tight and targeted campaign of Facebook ads – to be served exclusively to the fans of the Crock Pot Girls. After all, who is more likely to click “Like” on your crock pot recipe page than someone who already likes a page about crockpot cooking? And if their page sucks and fails? Then they aren’t hurting you are they?

So, go ahead and read about these fun viral hit stories; Heck use ‘em in your presentations too. But then go right back to staying focused on what you were doing before your boss asked you about this: build a great page that works for YOUR business goals.

{ 12 comments }

What I Learned from Summer Camp About Facebook Pages

by Carol Schiller on July 15, 2011

This week my 8 year old daughter started daytime summer camp, and came home with this sticker on her chest:

Facebook "Like us" sticker

Note: Do NOT use your customer's children as marketing vehicles


It says, “See all the fun we are having at camp!” Like us on Facebook”…

So, the camp is asking me to “Like” their Facebook page. Which I totally get, except for a few things:

First, I already “Liked” their page when they asked me in an email a while ago. And since I tend to pay more attention to Facebook pages than the average citizen, I have repeatedly checked it out. And you know what? As a mom and customer, there’s just not much to “Like” about the page. In marketing language, their content sucks.

Second, I’m totally cool with them asking me to ‘Like” their page in almost every which way: Emails; at the bottom of every single one of those dozens of forms I have to sign; a big sign on the door — hey, even a camp ditty with a line about how fun their Facebook page is(n’t). But a sticker on my kid’s chest? Now you are creeping me out.

What can everyone who runs a Facebook page learn from this?

1. Don’t use desperation tactics to drive your Facebook page. Especially when it comes to people’s kids. First think, “How would I feel if someone used this tactic on me? Could I do something similar that would work just as well? ” My friend Lua over at Miss Lulu Blogs rightly pointed out that even putting it on her backpack would have been way better.

2. As the always-amazing Ramon DeLeon commented, the problem here is really lack of winning content. See, my older daughter attends another summer camp, a sleepaway camp no less, and their Facebook content is equally bad. It’s a sleepaway camp people! Can you think of a better, more interested audience than parents of kids who are away for the summer? That page should be HUMMING with interaction among interested parents. What do they got? Nada.

Just imagine:
“Name your kid’s favorite Harry Potter book correctly to win a free goody bag for the whole bunk!”

Parents name the book and their kid, camp checks, and declares the winners both to the campers on site and then to the parents, on the Facebook page of course. Thus, kids and parents have a unique interaction VIA Facebook that is fun for all.

“Congratulations to Joey in the Raccoon bunk for having a mom who knows her Harry Potter! He and all his buddies will be enjoying candy bars and popcorn tonight!”

And I just made that up.

What do you recommend for juicing up a summer camp Facebook page?

{ 2 comments }

Don’t Write Twitter Off Just Yet

by Carol Schiller on May 17, 2011

Recently, the always excellent Jay Baer, who speaks, writes and consults about social media, did an interview with Steve Lundin of Big Frontier about, well, social media. It’s a great interview and I highly recommend that you watch it. There’s just one thing…

During the interview Jay explains his belief that Twitter has become a sort of niche news service packed with useful links, but where real conversations have been severely compromised, and which only get increasingly harder to have as you get more successful at it. Maybe, but I think there are still plenty of ways companies can take advantage of Twitter to have excellent, on-brand, real-time conversations with influential individuals – especially if you market to moms.

Here’s my list of ways to use Twitter to connect with moms on-line:

1. Twitter Parties: It’s hard to think of a better medium for moms to get together and party than Twitter. After all, we are busy, tired, probably wearing sweatpants and have drastically different schedules depending on our kids’ ages. We also don’t love paying a sitter. Enter Twitter Parties: join when you can, from home, in between everything else that you are doing. Even better, since you are partying with other moms, if you get interrupted, everyone understands.

Indeed some of the very best, most active parties on Twitter are run by top mom bloggers and influencers, including Jyl Johnson Pattee of Mom It Forward’s Girls Night Out (#GNO) fame, Amy Lupold Blair of Resourceful Mommy; and Amy Bellgardt of Mom Spark Media, just to name a few.

Whether you are brand-new to Twitter or have been using it for years, it’s a piece of cake to hop onto a Twitter party related to your brand’s topic area and join in the conversation. And I do mean conversation.

Not into “mom” topics? That’s Ok, there are chats on Twitter about EVERYTHING, including travel (Travelers Night In is on Thursdays – just follow#TNI); food (Foodies Night In -which I co-host – is on Mondays at #FNIchat)… you get the picture.

So whether you run a hotel, a food exporting company or a local hair salon, the chances are pretty good there’s a Twitter party that makes sense for you. But don’t think of it merely as a way to get noticed. Think of a Twitter party as a way to LISTEN to your target audience. And if they talk about your competition, or if your competition shows up, please for goddsakes, LET IT RIDE. Unless you want to pay some fancy-pants marketing agency a fat fee for a competitive analysis. And even then it won’t be as good. Trust me.

2. Hashtags for Events: I know, I know for the really big events like Blog World Expo and SXSW, the hashtags are so overloaded with traffic, it’s almost meaningless. But there are plenty of small events where the hashtags are a GREAT way to listen, connect and yes, make an impression for your brand. This is particularly true of the smaller and mid-sized  mom blogger conferences.

Now this is important: If you are not actually at the conference, it is absolutely a great idea to follow the conversation via Twitter and LEARN. It’s also OK to jump in once in a while with RELEVANT comments. But it is absolutely, positively NOT OK to pretend you are there, hog up the stream, or send overt marketing messages. This is really bad manners, and if you get busted will result in a level of widespread ridicule you most assuredly do not want to incur.

Come to think of it, this is bad manners even if you are at the conference, so either way, DON’T do it.

3. Customer service. In many cases, this should be right up at number one on the list. If you do NOTHING else on Twitter but answer questions from current customers and prospects, then you are still putting it to good use. You would be AMAZED at how happy people are when they send a “help!” tweet and actually get a response. I have personally seen people turn 180 degrees around from, “This product sucks” to “Wow, what great service!” within just 24 hours. THESE are the people who go on to become your most passionate offline word-of-mouth advocates. Especially if they are under-appreciated moms. (And is there any other kind?)

So please, with a cherry on top, don’t give up on Twitter yet, OK?

{ 7 comments }

How to Pick My Brain

by Carol Schiller on April 3, 2011

Every free-lancer, marketer or entrepreneur faces this dilemma: How to deal with a slew of requests to have coffee and “pick your brain”. Here’s how I solved it:

First, let’s clear something up. I do drink a lot of coffee and eat lunch, but I generally do it sitting at my desk. My schedule as a mom who works full time,  freelances occasionally and volunteers at school when pressed, means my days are packed end to end. If I do have free time, it almost always happens after 10 pm when the three kids are asleep, and my house is (sort of clean) and my work is (mostly) finished. However, by that point my brain has just enough left in it to watch back episodes of Glee or Veronica Mars.

Which is to say that unless I’m having a hugely unusual week, if you wait until I’m available for coffee or lunch it’s never gonna happen.

I do, however, offer free “pick your brain” time every day, 7 days a week, from 6:30am to 7:15am — while I walk my dog. I never miss this appointment (dogs work that way), and although I normally use this time to listen to audiobooks or make phone calls to the East Coast, it’s the best guaranteed available space in my day.

When I first started doing this I was amazed at how many people took me up on it. After all, it rains 9 months of the year here in Seattle. Now, people just know that’s the best time to catch me, and some even bring their own pooches along too. The best part? I always learn at least as much as I share.

So, if a friend of a friend says I’d be a good person to talk to about writing copy, or social media or starting a business, I’ve got a built in way to respond within a reasonable time frame, while still respecting my busy schedule.

Got a “pick your brain” trick of you own? Share it.

{ 3 comments }

← Previous Entries