Check out the article and let me know what you think by commenting below.

This article discusses WalMart using RFID scanners to enhance their customer service.  The scanner can be used long distance to scan inventory to determine stock levels.  The advantage being that as stocks of an item run low they can be replaced before customers are inconvenienced.

Only problem is, according to CrunchGear, these scanners can apparently be used to scan the information on your passpart, some credit cards, transit passes and driver’s licences e.t.c.

With a family member currently battling identity theft, likely made possible by a retailer’s records being hacked, this latest customer service ‘improvement’ makes my blood boil!  What are they thinking?  What are WE thinking to allow it to happen?

While I’m generally not in favor of government intervention, this is one instance where I believe a stop needs to be put on things at the highest level.

As a marketing consultant and business writer, I am always in favor of knowing your customer better in order to serve them better.  In this instance, the benefit is so incredibly negligible and the dangers so enormous that I can see no justification for implementing such a strategy.

Your thoughts?

A strategic Social Media strategy can greatly assist by taking care of much of the ‘slog work’ of nurturing leads through the process of qualification through to conversion – and beyond.

Average statistics about B2B sales conversions and sales cycles are not terribly encouraging.  Take a look at this chart prepared by Marketing Sherpa:

Length of B2B sales cycles from Lead Generation to Sales Conversion - courtesy Marketing Sherpa.

As you can see clearly from this chart, the biggest payoff comes between the 3rd and 6th months of the process. While this article doesn’t go into detail regarding frequency of communication between the sales person and the prospect, or the method of contact, from experience I know that nurturing a lead requires at least a monthly contact – often more depending on specific circumstances.

Social Media is perfect as a tool to maintain consistency, especially when overt or aggressive frequent contact is not appropriate. This is the situation for many B2B organizations from consultants to manufacturers.

Social Media allows an organization to maintain a frequent, but low key level of contact over a sustained period of time – and in my opinion – could help to increase sales conversions, especially long term.

Traditionally, communication between a sales person and a prospect comprises:

• face to face sales calls
• telephone calls
• direct mail

I’m not including general advertising as this is not usually direct, monitorable contact.

Once a sales person has visited a prospect, and made some follow up calls, it’s difficult to get in front of that prospect again for a period of time without a really good reason.  Strategically scheduled direct mail is useful, but it’s time consuming and can be relatively costly.

Social Media, however, is virtually free, low key and contacts can be made on an accelerated rate of frequency. Unlike direct mail which has to have a full and logical message and reason for its existence, Social Media allows for short, quick comments which may or may not be set up to link back to fuller information.  These ‘sound bytes’ are useful in building awareness, assisting in establishing credibility and in nurturing an ongoing relationship open for two way communication.  All of which can be extremely helpful in not only speeding up the sales cycle, but ensuring that qualified leads are not lost- either through loss of interest, or through being poached by the competition while in the sales funnel.

The world of copywriting is all too often segmented into tight niches.  Long form copy.  Short form copy. Internet content.  Landing page specialist. B2B. B2C.  It seems that every activity that requires words being strung together has been designated as a copywriting ‘niche’.

In fact, most self employed writers I know do specialize to some extent, however, especially in today’s economy, often value is added by some generalization. When it comes to Social Media writing and persuasion, I believe it’s essential to be a skilled generalist who understands copy as well as marketing.

Being too much of a specialist can be detrimental as far as the value you offer is concerned.

I remember, years ago, being shocked to hear that the construction trade had a multitude of different specialist carpenters.  For instance, in the building of a staircase, I was told, one carpenter would specialize in building the underlying structure while another specialized in the treads and risers.  To me that seemed awfully odd.  To have a staircase built, I needed to employ two different carpenters?

A similar thing has developed in the field of professional writing.  With the advent of Social Media, blogging first became all the rage.  American Artists and Writers Institute began advertising blogging as a niche market.  Then Twitter become the thing.  It was beginning to look as if a writer who wanted to sell their services in Social Media, they had to specialize in just just one area.

Of course, that’s ridiculous and many writers simply adopted the entire Social Media gamut as a single niche.  However, to be successful as a writer for Social Media,  it is necessary to fully understand the nuances behind each of these platforms.

Being familiar with long form copy, short copy and autoresponder copy certainly helps a writer involved in Social Media, but, there’s another skill that’s equally important.  In fact, it’s probablymore important than good writing skills.

That skill is developed through a basic understanding of Social Media as a marketing tool.

The primary structure of many Social Media strategies is blog post to Facebook and Twitter. The blog post being the closest to the an old fashioned article and twitter being closest to  a text message.  Your blog followers will have an opportunity to read your entire post.  Your Twitter followers will only have perhaps a second or two to see your tweet, and perhaps only a split second longer to decide if they want to click on your tweet or not.

Understanding the different psychologies inherent in each different platform will help you become a more skillful persuader.

Each platform has its own uses and its own structure.  While you may understand that Twitter, for instance, allows 140 characters per tweet, it may not be clear as to how to best utilize these characters.

Your post is disseminated to Twitter via a service such as Twitterfeed – this will provide a title and a shortened url leading people to the post.  But… is that title dynamic enough to capture the nanosecond attention span of your followers?  In truth, the more active your followers and the more information they’re seeing popping up in their Twitter home page, the less likely that great headline is to be seen, never mind clicked on.

For instance, the headline in this post is: Social Media:  nanosecond persuasion?  may be fine for a blog post, but it will probably get missed in Twitter.  So here’s what I do to ensure that my tweets are more visible and more compelling.

Using a tweet scheduler, I shorten the url of the blog post and make some changes to the headline.  In this instance I may develop some headlines such as “How to use nanosecond persuasion” or “How to get your tweets clicked”

I then line up several tweets with different headlines and set them to be posted at specific time frames.

In this way, I increase the chances that my followers are going to see my tweets as well as increasing the chances that at least one of my headlines peaks their curiosity enough to click through to the blog post.

Nanosecond persuasion requires ultra short, powerfully intriguing and / or pertinent wording.  For instance, if a follower is using Twitter as a sales or lead generation tool, a tweet such as “How to use Twitter to generate leads faster” is more likely to get attention than “Use Twitter as part of your marketing campaign.”

The skills involved in writing tweets approximate the skills required for writing headlines.

The skills required for writing blog posts approximate the skills required for writing teaser articles.

The skills to put your entire Social Media strategy into top gear approximate the skills of a consumate marketer and sales person who understands how it all fits together into a seamless sales funnel.

Managing social media strategies for my clients as well as for myself, I am constantly working to increase the relevance of all the posting, tweeting, facebooking and so on that makes up the fabric of much of what I do.

With many of my clients who mostly fall into the B2B category, the challenge is encouraging participation by employees and by customers, and discouraging what Crowther terms ‘an endless stream of useless personal drivel‘ (way to go, Crowther!  that’s calling a spade a shovel, for sure!)

The trick is, how do you encourage people to stay engaged – or get engaged – in the first place while discouraging irrelevant chatter? Is that even possible?  For instance, a corporate client has all the ‘right’ social media accounts and they’re all pretty active – but they’re full of tweets and posts about what who did with whom on the weekend and how little Johnny’s faring in Little League.

In previous posts, I’ve spoken about giving control to employees and customers in order to encourage them to stay engaged, but how do you manage your social media strategy when it gets hijacked by enthusiastic socialites?

Good question.  Let me know if you have any better solutions than this:

Simply make sure that you have enough value added content being posted at consistent frequencies.  This requires someone administering this process rather than leaving it to chance and hoping that someone – anyone – will post something useful.

Also, encourage all the people posting to share something useful at least once a day. Let’s have fun, but let’s also keep the end in mind.  Rather than cracking down and offending everyone so that you end up with no activity – or only corporate-speak activity, why not simply steer in the direction you want to go?

Crowther makes a great point:  that you really have to offer something of value to your followers in order to firstly, stay followed, and secondly, make some money from your social media activities.

It’s all about connecting and a major reason for it’s viral explosion is that it’s interactive – a two way street where organizations and their customers or prospects get to know each other in an informal setting.

The trouble with organizations using Social Media is that often it’s a case of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It doesn’t work that well unless the organization understands and fully subscribes to this less formal means of communication.

Trying to control your Social Media presence can be quite tricky, as Starbucks discovered during it’s foray into Hungary.  It would be quite amusing if it weren’t so typical of corporate angst.  The story goes, according to this account published in SM Monitoring, that Starbucks fans in Hungary set up a ‘Starbucks’ fan page on Facebook and a Twitter account – both of which were unauthorized by the Starbucks group.

At any rate, the fan club grew to around 3,000 members.  The activity obviously convinced Starbucks that the time was now right for a Hungarian opening – though they had apparently tried before and failed.  But – and here’s where it gets to the part where you scratch your head – Krisztian Szabados, author of the article says that a few days before the Grand Opening, the Facebook fan page suddenly disappeared.  In it’s place appeared a new FaceBook fan page put up by Starbuck’s PR agency.

Quite obviously, the fans were pretty ticked and Social Media being the free and open-to-express-yourself platform it is, they were also very vocal about their displeasure.  Pretty soon Starbucks, although denying involvement in the fan controlled fan page disappearance, was receiving flack in the media.

Hmmm.  I guess as the Expedia ad goes, “… the fans know, man.  The fans know…”

The moral of the story? If you want to use Social Media to bring prospects and customers closer, you have to be able to relinquish some control and allow the interaction that makes Social Media so effective.  Yes, you want to protect your corporate image, but do you really want to stifle free discussion?  If you’re not too secure in how you think you’re being perceived in the market place, you might want to stifle any discussion that could make you look bad.  If you weren’t clever.

A clever marketer, or P.R. professional would take advantage of the situation, and as Twitter invites, ‘join the conversation’ rather than shut it down.  Only by joining the conversation is there an opportunity to get to that rotten apple in perhaps an otherwise perfectly good barrel.  By addressing negatives openly and honestly and having an opportunity to respond is the best and most credible way to repair any damage your image is currently suffereing.

Being concerned that the fans won’t treat your image properly and somehow make you look less professional or credible is short sighted.  In fact, if people like you enough to create  a mostly positive Social Media buzz about you in the first place, they’re already in your court.  They WANT you to succeed.  They WANT to interact with you.  And how they portray you is a pretty good indicator of how you’re perceived in the market place, anyway.  This in one case where you don’t want to ‘beat them’ you actually do want to ‘join them’, win them over and empower them to give you more positive free exposure than a P.R. Agency could’ve dreamed of 10 years ago!

The blurring of corporate and personal interaction goes a long way towards establishing relationships.  Frequent interaction on various social media platforms intensifies the relationship, and of course, the loyalty.

Does this mean that the person in your organization responsible for your social media marketing needs to share intimate details of either the organization or it’s staff?  No – but there should be some personal tidbits included on a fairly frequent basis.

How frequent?  Hoe personal?

At least once a day, and not too personal.  Think about it this way:  you share some of your personal likes, dislikes and activities with your co-workers, but there are some things you just wouldn’t want spread around the office.  Those are the kinds of things you wouldn’t want broadcast on Twitter or your professional FaceBook page either.  Use your discretion.

When posting personal type information, stick to things that you don’t mind everyone knowing, such as sport or other interesting events you may be involved in, charitable causes you’re supporting, funny anecdotes that aren’t offensive or embarrassing, office related trivia – for instance, your organization may hold various events or internal competitions and it may be fun to post an ongoing account of how these progress.

The point of the personal side of social media is to engage your audience in a warm, emotional way – the same way that you engage other business people face to face.  You know it’s important to show your human side whilst maintaining a persona that attracts respect.  Social media works the same way.  Don’t ever succumb to the temptation to blow off steam on a social media platform – as soon as it’s published to the world, you’ll probably regret it!

In determining the  type of content you should post in social media venues, concentrate on things that will be of interest to others first, and then, equally important, feature information that will be helpful. Nothing goes further to cement a growing relationship and ensure customer loyalty than being a trusted advisor who demonstrates a willingness to help out wherever possible.

Make that your social attitude and you’ll find that your list of friends and followers increases quickly and stays loyal longer.

The obvious violations this practice is intended to deter is the use of email addresses obtained under false pretenses.  For instance, you have a competition at a trade show and take in business cards as entries to the competition.  Later you input all the email addresses from the cards into your email marketing database and begin sending them your communications.

Unless you requested permission to communicate with these people by email when you obtained their business card, you are using it without permission – they are not opted into your list and many email marketing service providers will refuse to allow you to upload a list so compiled.

We all hate spam – that goes without saying.  But what about when a customer or prospect actually signs up for email communication manually, perhaps at a POS in a store or by filling in an email contact detail request form?  Depending on how quickly they are emailed by you after signing up, you may find that you still run into issues. If there is a time delay of more than a few days, they may forget that they signed up and either unsubscribe or make a spam report.

Some email marketing service providers require what’s known as a double opt0in.  This means that however the contact details are provided, whether they are provided manually and input later or provided by means of filling in an opt-in box on a web site, the sign-up can only be confirmed by clicking on a link provided by email in response to the sign-up.

If this link is not clicked on, the subscription is not activated and the person will not receive any emails from you.

Theoretically, this is fine and dandy, but what happens when you want to implement an email strategy and have an existing customer list?  What happens when your customer list is older and barely understands how to open an email let alone understand the opt in process?

On the surface, the checks and balances in place  protect legitimate emailers and their recipients from wholesale spammers, but can they go too far? Is the vigilance against unsolicited email too … vigilante? When you compare email to printed ‘junk’ mail, the rules regarding email are far stricter and it’s far more difficult to email an unsubscribed recipient than it is to send them something by snail mail.  Is this fair?

It really depends on the situation.  If you have a customer with whom you regularly do business and with whom you’ve communicated by phone and mail, is it unethical to add email to your communication methods? After all, you don’t ask for permission before you call or mail them.  In addition, if you’re using a reputable email marketing service provider, the recipient always has the option to unsubscribe, in which case, you will not be able to email them again.  They also have the option of reporting you for spamming with the simple click of a link. Too many spam reports and your email marketing service provider will soon be your ex-email marketing service provider.

Reputable businesses who use reputable email marketing service providers usually self regulate.  They want nothing less than customers or prospects reporting them for spam.

Renegade email marketers use bulk emailers who don’t abide by email marketing ethics.  They gather emails without permission and they email without providing unsubscribe options.  They will continue to do so regardless of rules and best practices.  Because of unethical operators, legitimate business people can sometimes face some extreme challenges with email marketing.

According to Marketing Sherpa, there are ways to ensure that your email list delivers the best possible response and doesn’t face any accusations of unauthorized mailing.

They suggest that each method of adding email addresses to your list is audited to ensure that the person being added understands that they are being added to your email list for the purposes of communicating with them.  In addition, they suggest that if you are sending more than one type of email that  they are asked for their preferences as to which ones they’re interested in receiving. Their third recommendation is that you make the frequency with which you’ll be sending emails very clear at the outset.

In this way, your recipients are more likely to receive emails from you that are of interest to them.  And you will be more likely to have a higher rate of opens and click throughs, as well as less spam reports and unsubscribes.  Remember, lack of spam reports and unsubscribes are not an indication of email success. Opens and click throughs will give you a far better idea of how many of your recipients are perceiving your emails as relevant – a precursor to taking action in the form of enquiries or sales.

A WetPaint study cited bottom line increases of up to 18% over 12 months after social media strategy implementation.  JC Williams reports that 91% of consumers say that peer reviews are their primary guide in buying decisions.  Marketing Sherpa reiterates what we already know – that people trust a friend’s recommendation over an advertisement.

Relationship is really the fundamental basis of the success of social media marketing. It’s the reason that social media marketing will trump traditional marketing every time. Relations form more quickly and easily in social media venues which offer a level of interactivity and two way communication that’s impossible using traditional marketing means. Social Media relationships are formed on the basis of common interests, making it ideal for target marketing.

Of course it’s easy to see the logic of social media when you look at consumer marketing, but many in the business to business arena are skeptical about the viability of social media as a business marketing tool.

I am not.  I’m convinced that social media marketing is a viable and desirable tool in the corporate marketing arsenal.  Why?  If you’ve been reading my posts for any length of time, you probably already have a good idea:

• business people are still human and make buying decisions the same way the rest of humanity does – emotionally first and logically second
• in business, trust is a valuable commodity.  With the economy yo-yo’ing it has become even more important to make wise purchasing decisions that won’t come back to haunt you.  Buying from a trusted advisory source is key
• social media is significantly less costly than traditional advertising and marketing – and that’s really important when budgets are being trimmed to the bone
• suitable prospects and existing customers are easily found in social media networks.

But, even if you agree that social media is the vehicle of choice, you may not have much idea as to how to actually set up and implement a measurable and effective strategy.

Social Media marketing isn’t rocket science, it’s relatively simple.  However, if you’re a ‘newbie’ at this game it can suck an unprecedented amount of time.  Does this mean that unless you have someone in your organization to whom you can assign the task on a full time basis that it’s not practical for you?  Not in the least.

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s much more cost effective to outsource the process to someone who specializes in this rapidly developing discipline.  It’s similar to the difference between going to a foreign city where you don’t speak the language and deciding whether to hire a car, or hire an English speaking taxi driver.  You may well get to your destination both ways, but invariably, the taxi driver will get you there quicker and easier.  Outsourcing the process to  someone who has the whole process taped already could save you countless hours of frustration and lost opportunity.

If you’ve been searching your Facebook Fan page for a link, let me warn you, it’s not that obvious.  It took me quite a while to find out how to do this with my FaceBook fan page.

The link is on the ‘Notes’ application page.  It’s quite strange that FaceBook makes it so obscure seeing as this is one of the most popular social media platforms.  Perhaps it’s because it’s only now evolving from a personal to a business application.

I hope that this step-by-step instruction check list will help save you time and frustration.

Here’s how to quickly access it and set up your automated feed:

1. Open your Facebook Fan page

2. When you’re on the correct page, you will see your Fan page name at the top with the links ‘Create page / View Page / Delete Page’ directly underneath the name.

3. Underneath this you will see the links to change the various settings: Settings, Wall Settings, Mobile and underneath this you will see ‘Applications’ under which appear links to all the various applications.

4. In the list of applications, you will see ‘Notes’ – click the ‘Edit’ option for the Note link

5. On the right hand side of the page that appears, you will see ‘Notes settings’

6. Under this heading there will be a link to import an external blog, click on this link

7. Follow the instructions and put in your blog’s RSS feed url

This should then automatically import the most recent posts from your blog into your FaceBook Fan Page and each time you create a new post on your blog it should feed to the FaceBook fan page within an hour or so.  I have discovered that at times this simply stop working for some unknown reason.  If this happens, I simply go into my Facebook Fan Page and re-import the blog.

If you need help with this, I’m happy to assist.  Comment below with your questions and I will be happy to help.

Even if you love hanging out at social media venues, at some point, there has to be a balance between tweeting, facebooking, blogging, youtubing and getting some work done! Fortunately there are all kinds of apps that can be set up to feed one post to all your social media venues.

I’ve found the most successful way of doing this is to have a blog feed to my facebook page, my twitter account and my LinkedIn profile. Each of these venues has their own app for importing a blog feed, so it’s merely a matter of figuring out how to navigate each of these platforms to set it up.  It’s pretty simple once you know how, but finding out exactly where these apps are located on the platform and how to use them once you’ve found them can take a while.

In future posts, I’ll give a check list of how to set these up on each different platform, so if you’d like to know, please follow me on Twitter or Facebook or subscribe to this blog.

In my experience, the most difficult one to set up is the Facebook app, and that’s because it’s difficult (or at least I find it so) to actually find the darn thing.  Once you’ve found it, then the step by step procedure is pretty simple.

But, setting up a feed from your blog is only the beginning.  Once that’s done, the next step is to figure out how to have things posted on specific platforms, such as Twitter, multiple times during the day.

While one blog post is more than sufficient per day, multiple tweets are essential. Depending on how many people your followers are following, your tweeted post may only be visible for a few seconds.  If you only tweet it once a day, the chances are great that your follower may easily miss it.

I’ve come across one app that allows you to schedule multiple posts over a period of time. It also allows to you track your messages and posts, though the posts of people you follow are not visible.  It’s pretty useful if you want to make sure that your Twitter account is more active and you don’t want to have to physically post more than once a day.

The app I’m currently using is Co Tweet.  There are other apps that do this and I’ll review them in the future.

If you have any specific questions about social media set-up, please don’t hesitate to email me or to ask them here by leaving a comment!