An Intro to Twitter

Reference: http://marketingland.com/library/twitter

Twitter has become a very powerful tool in communicating with like-minded individuals in a nearly effortless way. Many people use Twitter to communicate with their favorite bands, people, and businesses. This stresses the importance to take advantage of this opportunity to talk with your customers because if you aren’t talking with them, the other businesses are leaving you in the dark, so to speak.  The Groundswell has created a method to integrate it into your business that I have touched on in my previous post.

Listening withTwitter

When it comes to interacting with your customers, you must first listen to what they have to say. This is easily done by developing a following and looking at what they post about your company or brand. Twitter provides information 24/7 allowing anyone to post or comment on the subject at anytime, which can be good and bad depending on how the situation is handled.

Twitter provides companies the opportunity to communicate in more personal way than other online sources. Through having meaningful and helpful conversations with your customer base and followers, the quality of service provided from the company will increase; however, on the negative aspect of this useful tool, if this following is ignored and a left unanswered, the problem could get out of hand very quickly with how easy it is to re-tweet something that interested someone.

Talking with Twitter

When it comes to properly talking and engaging with your following, it is important to identify the trends that are happening to be able to reach the largest audience. Hashtags (#) are used to tag a post for others to see. By adding trending tags to your post, the amount of people who will scroll across your post will increase. Engaging the audience on Twitter is much more difficult than other platforms because Twitter only allows for a maximum of 140 characters.

Earlier in the semester, I read an article by Andreas Caplan and Michael Haenlein called Users of the World Unite which provided 5 steps to be more social:

1. Be Active

2. Be Interesting

3. Be Humble

4. Be Unprofessional

5. Be Honest

These steps are important to remember because if you aren’t active, people will forget you among the mass amount of changing information that is constantly happening. You must be interesting to stand out from the noise and all the others who are trying to have their voice heard. By being humble and honest, your followers will be more enticed to engage with you and tell their friends about the company.

Energizing with Twitter

In order to energize your customer base, you must listen to what they are saying first. You are easily able to find the people who are interested through trending tags. After identification of the customer base, you can respond to followers and re-tweet positive things they have said and address the negative things in a timely manner. For example, the people of Calgary tweeted about bringing a new item to the Taco Bell menu that wasn’t available in Canada yet. The mayor of Calgary seen this and by working his magic, he got Taco Bell to bring the requested item to their western Canada locations.

Supporting with Twitter

As Twitter becomes increasingly popular, the usefulness of it also increases. However, if a company leaves their Twitter unattended and doesn’t take the feedback from its followers, the reputation could be impacted negatively as the conversations continue whether or not you decide to participate. I have seen first hand the benefits of being active from the NAIT account response time, which if during business hours often responds within minutes. NAIT actively participates in all the conversations regarding trending tags around the school. This improves the reputation of the company and should be utilized to its advantage.

Embracing with Twitter

Embracing your customer is about getting your point across and activly engaging them. Doing this through Twitter can be the hardest part of the process because of the limitation of 140 characters as mentioned previously. With the many different opinions from a following, communicating with such little space can be difficult but if done properly, can create feedback that would have been much more costly to obtain. By tweeting a new product or service, it is possible to get your following to embrace the change in a fast way.

Refer back to the POST Method blog that was posted to get a better understanding of how to integrate your company with The Groundswell.

Reference: http://www.textivia.com/business-twitter/

Check out my Twitter here!

References

Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M. (n.d.). Users of the world, unite! the challenges and opportunities of social media.. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/escpexchange/kaplan-haenlein-users-of-the-world-unite-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-social-media

Integrating the Groundswell with Business

After preparing the steps and organizing Groundswell, the next step is to properly integrate them. The social media revolution will continue to progress whether or not you decide to get involved and utilize it to your advantage. This stresses the point that if you don’t jump on the train early, you’re going to get left in the dark.

This week I have learned a process to aid in determining the social medium to reach your customers called the P.O.S.T process – People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. The process focuses on determining what people are involved, making clear what your objectives are, and knowing the strategy to determine what technology your target market utilizes the most. Many businesses end up doing what their competitors are doing simply because it’s what they are doing; however, if you can be ahead of the trend and actually predict what technologies will be popular, you will be able to reach a much wider audience.

First, knowing the techno-graphic profile of your customer is essential to establishing what technology is best and easiest to reach them through. By knowing what technologies your customer is using, you will have much higher views because you can predict where to place your advertisements.

Moving forward to the objectives, there are five that the Groundswell has listed. These objectives are: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing. All of these are important in their own way, although I will only be covering one in this blog. I believe that Listening is extremely important because it can aid in problem solving and generate ideas that may not have been heard before. Through listening, it is possible to get customer feedback and make product improvements. This can be very valuable to a business because it can be looked at as cheap R&D. Listening is key to staying ahead of the trend.

Next, developing a strategy on how to move forward, establish what changes will be made and how they will improve operations can help a lot. Having the right people in charge is important because only listening isn’t enough. You need people in charge who can energize, support, and embrace the strategy and everyone involved. People are easily distracted so having someone to keep people on track and making objectives clear will benefit the execution of the strategy.

Finally, after establishing the people involved and the techno-graphic profile, making clear the objectives and creating the strategy to follow, you will be better informed on what technologies are the best to reach your target market. Old forms of advertising are becoming less and less useful as people are always looking at phones or tablets. Even when doing something as important as driving, people still choose to look at their phones because they feel it is more important than not crashing their vehicle. By knowing what devices your customers are using, it is much easier to reach them and listen to them as well as getting your message seen.

The P.O.S.T. process is very important for a business such as RBC in the banking industry because you are able to listen to negative and positive feedback and contact those involved to address the situation. By maintaining your customer relationship, the customer feels like the bank cares more than ever before because they are able to voice their opinion. Many people will post messages on Twitter and Facebook about bad experiences they have had with a company. This can be changed into a positive rather than a negative by taking what they have to say seriously and creating a solution for their issue instead of ignoring it, leaving them frustrated. This process should not be overlooked when operating a business no matter how big or small it is and taking serious consideration to it will help greatly.

References

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell. (p. 230). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Preparing for the Groundswell Transformation

It is now quite obvious that utilizing social media can add value to your business if implemented correctly. This raises the question of what steps does an organization take to do so? The Groundswell explains how an organization can do just this in a few simple steps without harming the business model. It is important to listen to what your customer is trying to say first and slowly implement efficient ways to engage with them. By doing so, you can create direct ways of interacting with the customer and reach a wider audience.

There are five steps the Groundswell has covered to start the transformation of your company to become a successful player in social media. The first step is to “start small” – rushing the change will only cause issues so it is important to take small steps and implement them correctly. The second is to “educate the executives” – if the executives of the business don’t believe in the power of social media then it is destine for failure. By demonstrating how this can benefit the business, they will be more willing to accept proposed changes. Third step for the transformation is to “get the right people to run the strategy” – It isn’t the best option to pick just anyone for running the social media of an organization. Finding someone who wants to improve customer relations and actively engage with them will maximize the benefits of social media. The fourth step is to “get your agency and technology partners in sync” – if your partners aren’t involved or don’t understand the changes being made, they must take the time to embrace the changes. Finally, the organization must “plan for the long-term” – it is important to have a plan to follow to create direction for the organization. (Li & Bernoff, 2011)

When looking at RBC as an example of using the Groundswell to engage with customers, they are involved in multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It seems as they are quite active on Facebook to answer questions, however I have found an article regarding the outsourcing of social media jobs within RBC. Their plan may not have been executed as well as they had hoped. Their claim was “External suppliers allow us to leverage their scale and technical skills to continually improve our operational processes and service, and re-invest in initiatives that enhance the client experience” (Kwan, 2013). Their intentions were good; however, the public thought otherwise and actually went as far as creating a boycott. This is a perfect example of how if not done properly, social media can ultimately harm your business.

 Here is a video that explains the foreign workers issue in more detail.

References

Kwan, J. (2013, April 8). Rbc outsourcing controversy spreads on social media. Retrieved from http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/blogs/insight/rbc-outsourcing-controversy-spreads-social-media-145202067.html

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell. (p. 230). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Then and Now…

It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have readily available access to computers or cell phones and even internet. Since the emergence of these technologies, many aspects of communication has evolved including the invention of social media, making connecting with other people around the world easier than ever before. We now also have the tools to track many aspects of traffic on the internet to assist in narrowing down a target market and to reach the most users possible.

Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/elderscrollsonline.com

One of these tools includes alexa.com which allows you to search for a website and it provides many statistics about users on the website. This is very useful for learning what the specific target market is for that website and can provide answers to driving traffic higher. When looking at elderscrollsonline.com, it is easy to see that the majority of users searching this website are males from home with some college education.

 

Source: http://empowered.forrester.com/tool_consumer.html

 

Forrester is another great tool to again narrow down a target market and reach a larger number of users. After using alexa, it shows the users on elderscrollsonline are mostly males in the U.S. (30% of users). Forrester says that most of the people for elderscrollsonline.com are Spectators (93%) which are those who watch social media like looking at Tweets and viewing YouTube videos. The other majority is Joiners (84%) and they participate in social media like Facebook and comment on videos and Tweets. Elderscrollsonline captures their market by posting important announcement about the game and connect with the “joiners” as well as videos to attempt to get the “spectators” interested in the game. By appealing to both the majorities, they can reach more users easier. I personally had an invite to the elder scrolls online beta this past weekend and  was able to connect with the developers announcements very easily.

NSA Targets Phone Apps Like ‘Angry Birds’ for User Data.

Protecting personal data is becoming a more and more difficult task as technology advances. Governments are stepping in and ignoring peoples rights and taking data from them for unknown purposes, all without the consent or knowledge of them doing so. Read more on this in the article:

NSA Targets User Data Through Phone Applications