Baby Step into Social Media
This is the tiniest and most critical step into the world of social media marketing: Google Alerts. Google Alerts are a fantastic, FREE service from Google. Complete a brief form with your company name (use quotation marks so it only sends you the links with the correct name). Choose “as-it-happens” in the How Often space. Then click on the Create Alert button!
Why do you want to do this? So you receive emails from Google any time someone refers to your business online. Someone writes a review on Yelp about you – you receive an email from Google. Someone “checks in” to your business using location-based social media, like Foursquare, Gowalla or Foodspotting – you receive an alert. Someone refers to you in a blog post – you receive an alert.
The reason you want to know as-it-happens is not only for the gratification of a job well done when someone gives your business a great online mention … but when the online mention is not so kind. Companies are judged by the word of mouth of the public. You may rely on word of mouth marketing for growing your business to a certain extent. Social media tools offer you an opportunity to be part of the dialogue. You may publicly right a wrong. You keep your customer who is upset while impressing others that you responded to an issue by demonstrating excellent responsive customer service.
Recently I had an interaction that frustrated me … a lot … with Dell. I normally don’t whine on my Twitter account, but my situation seemed to be something the public should know. I won’t get into it here, since it was a clerical error on their end that they corrected. But the only reason they knew I was angry was I posted, on a Sunday, that they #lostloyalcustomer.
I immediately received a message on Twitter from @DellCares, which I responded to with my information:
Their team was fantastic. I sent them my back-up of the situation. They reviewed it and remedied the situation. My faith was restored! I posted on Twitter that Dell and I were friends again – I even received this tweet:
By using Twitter, I made them aware there was a problem and they had an opportunity to repair the relationship, publicly. Before these tools, your customers would just share their bad experience with each other and you never knew it to make it right. You just lost customers. Not to say this will never happen, but now you have an opportunity to participate in the conversation if your customers use social media to share their experience. Set Google Alerts so any time someone communicates about your brand online, Google tells you. Follow the link they send in the Google Alert email and respond to the individual. Demonstrate your commitment to your customers by demonstrating responsive customer service and reinforce, don’t lose, that relationship with your customer.
