On Mashable.com there is a wonderful article written by Maria Ogneva that focuses on your business – building relationships to help solve problems for your customers. Understanding what products you have – that will solve those customer problems today, tomorrow and next year. It goes back to a want need and a benefit. When we can fulfill those 3 human touch points – you begin to find that your brand not only becomes just a product – but rather integrated into ones day to day life.

What we loved about this particular article is that it focuses on the various business departments that make up a company, marketing, sales, customer service traditional advertising and product design. Outlining what their role is in relation to social media and how each can better serve the customer using social media tools.

Quoted from the article I think the author Maria Ogneva says it best “our brand is no longer what you say it is, but rather what the patchwork of customer and employee voices says it is. That being said, you still have a tremendous opportunity to help steer these conversations and educate the public in a conversational, open and honest manner so they feel well equipped to talk about your brand when they choose to do so.”

How are the various departments in your business serving your customers using social media?

Best Nicole

When it comes to social media for business, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. But to ensure results, you must align it with your overall business objectives and avoid falling for “shiny new objects” simply because they are trendy or hyped.

For example, a new business or “first mover” may want to focus on establishing thought leadership, while a more mature business should aim for customer support. In all cases, creating a product that actually solves problems for customers, present and future, should be every business’s top priority — and you should be using social media to help you figure out what that product is.

Below, we’ll take a closer look at how each department can blend traditional and social media to drive business goals and collaborate on a seamless customer experience.

Marketing Touchpoints

Remember that your business needs to have as many touchpoints with your customers as possible, of which social media is just one:

• A clear website that establishes value and helps customers weave your brand into their own story.
• Thought leadership and content creation, in the form of blogging, guest-blogging, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, presentations, and videos help educate the market. Use social media to help create and share content, as well as create discussions around this content.
• Relationships and outreach: As a result of your social media listening, discovery and engagement, you will undoubtedly form relationships with other thought leaders with whom you can collaborate on content, form guest-blogging relationships, create podcasts, etc. I have started many of my professional relationships on Twitter, which have later led to in-person meetings, client relationships, co-creating content, consulting engagements, jobs, etc.
• Events, online as well as offline, are also great awareness vehicles and can take the form of attending and speaking at conferences, sponsorships, and producing your own. Social media can and should be used to drive awareness, collect content input from the public, and provide ways for people in your network to meet in person. Take the time to produce content around the event. Interview people you respect and with whom you have built online and offline relationships, and share that content via social media.
• Then of course, there is social media itself, which is a must for any brand building effort. Your social media strategy should include actively monitoring Twitter (), Facebook (), blogs, discussion forums and other outpost communities, with the purpose of learning, engaging and forming relationships.
• Third-party support, in the form of partners, resellers, and blogger outreach, is also tremendously important. Forming and nurturing these relationships is crucial to your success as a brand, and can have a multiplicative effect on your social media and offline buzz.

Sales

You should also be using social media listening techniques to gather intelligence around your customers and prospects’ businesses to help drive better and richer conversations. Listen for purchase intent and identify clues about when people may be looking for your product.

Customer Service

This streamlines the customer experience. Imagine when a customer tweets an airline that she needs help; if the airline can tie her social data to its internal information associated with the reservation, it can help her that much better. Additionally, anyone in the company can help this customer, because there is a unified customer record available to all relevant parties inside the company.

The Intersection of Traditional and Social Media

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How will you receive traditional and social media requests for help? Perform a social media audit to understand where your customers are talking about products like yours, and set up a monitoring system attuned to those platforms.
• How will you triage your social media messages?
• How will you route and escalate your social media messages?
• How is that different (or not) from how you treat traditional e-mail and phone support?
• How much automation do you want?
• Do you use a hub-and-spoke system? If so, who is the hub — your social media manager or community manager?
• Are you giving Twitter responsibilities to existing phone and e-mail support reps, or are you hiring specific Twitter response teams? (This will largely depend on the volume of mentions you have and the size of your business.)
• How do they work with the rest of the customer service organization?

You also need to track workflow statistics on messages — social as well as traditional — and relate them to your success metrics. You need to have a unified reporting dashboard that integrates statistics for both kinds of support.

Product Intelligence and Design

• There’s a lot of information out there, and you can easily figure out what people are saying in aggregate by using the right monitoring and analysis platform. Because there is so much social data, you need smart text analytics to help you make sense of it all. When collecting customer intelligence, you should be blending traditional market research (surveys, focus groups, secondary research) with this type of social media research.
• On a more intimate level, you need to invite your customers behind the scenes and give them a stake in the future of the product. If your customers help you create the product, you can possibly reduce customer support queries and complaints in the future. One easy way that you can implement this today is by adding an idea generation and feedback community like UserVoice to your site.

The key is to establish a flow for easy and consistent information dissemination. Again, if you put your community manager at the helm, she can act as the liaison between the product team and the community providing ideas. Make strong multi-directional communication (between the community manager, product team, and the customer) a key priority.

Connecting as defined in the dictionary refers to “to establish communication between; put in communication”. Engagement is defined as “the act of engaging or the state of being engaged.” I think for many – the connecting aspect of social media refers to those that have huge numbers of followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook. Many people and businesses – believe that engagement happens when you connect by racking up thousands upon thousands of friends – on social networks  – but if you want the actual connection and relationships being cultivated – the numbers do not necessarily  reflect or equate to the numbers that are passed around as a badge of success in many cases. I wrote an earlier post just on this very fact – the actual interactions and or click – throughs to an accompanying website – can be deceiving – with a huge numerical following – to which no real relationships are cultivated.

As in all things relationships and engagement take time and dedication. It is no different then a new friendship. As you begin to show your commitment and trust the friendship blossoms. This rarely happens on the first meeting but rather upon repeated engagement. As you continue to grow in your commitment – to spend time on that relationship – both sides are much far more open to engage and SHARE with one another – those things that they appreciate and that which they don’t. As that trust builds they get to experience – the age ole creed “action speaks louder than words” and that you are definitely committed to the ongoing engagement – which can then be rewarded – by your community passing on this new found connection and relationship to their circle of influence. It is at this juncture that you will have built a foundation for an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship.

In the world of marketing where metrics and immediate ROI is so important – the value of this process can be overlooked and or misunderstood. Everyone wants immediate gratification and this is most likely not to occur – if the value that you really want to offer – is a connection that will lead to an  ongoing relationship.

Further to that – comes that fact – that many businesses feel that by adapting social media tools, such as video – they have connected and are now facilitating the engagement process. Problem with that is that if there is no way for the person to whom you have connected – to engage with you on an ongoing basis – as well as the other people who are part of the “tribe” sharing like minded interests – you return to  pushing out content that you aimed to share via a variety of mediums – for which – you hope can be passed along. Many times as we have all experienced – what we are craving is to actually have a one on one with someone else.

Moral of this post- is that connecting is the beginning – of establishing a relationship. One that will allow you to engage in a mutually beneficial “give and take relationship”, where both parties get to gain long term benefits. That as in all relationships – engagement takes TIME. By allowing the natural process to grow – your business wins by providing the customer with solutions for the things they need and the customer receiving the products and services wins by having access to a company that will work with them to offer products and services that will solve their problems. Better yet they have valuable advice to share with their circle of influence.

Now that sounds to me like the natural order of things!

Best Nicole

Everything you do to market your product and or services - is ultimately to drive people to your website and have them convert to a buying customer that comes back many times. This can also be said of the visitor who comes to your bricks and mortar business. Leveraging your website or social networking community to drive sales - not only via your website but also to your retail store is the goal for most.

One of the long standing difficulties and reasons for skeptics in the digital world - is the lack of success with attaining those sales conversions. Finding the right ways to connect with your target market as well as understanding the strategy - behind search words and phrases -will you get that customer to your site - so you can show them you have what they need.  When that visitor gets to your site - via the high ranking - that you have attained through strategic and well planned search word and phrases via Google – you need to keep them on your site. You want to excite them so that they want to stay – and be able to easily and quickly, show them that you have what they need or are looking for. 

I came across this excellent article that speaks to 2 ways to do that. DMN News posted an article that provides 2 ways, that you can ensure you make those conversions of visitors to your site - into customers that purchase and return to purchase regularly. Author Pam Foster explains what conversion means and lets you know in a quick and simple read - that you can have the highest ranking in the world and send visitors to your site – BUT- if you are not converting them into a buying customer then all your search efforts are for not.

STRATEGY is always the name of the game in all of the digital marketing and advertsing planning. The end result is always the sale – getting that person to convert from a visitor to a paying customer. So what is your strategy going to be in 2010 – 2011?

Best Nicole

What exactly is a Web site conversion, and why does clear, customer-focused Web content make such a difference?

First, a definition of web conversions:

Let’s say target prospects arrive at your Web site via a Google search result, an email or other means of driving traffic. If they’re delighted with your site and they find exactly what they’re looking for, they’ll take the next step to make a purchase, subscribe to your service, download a free trial, become a qualified sales lead, etc.

Through these actions, they are converting from a prospect to an active customer in some way.

The goal of most business Web sites is to convert as many site visitors as possible into paying customers and ideally improve conversion rates over time.

Now for the second part of the question: Why does clear, customer-focused web content make such a difference regarding conversions?

Many companies know it’s critical to use keywords in their content to drive great results in search engines. Sadly, many of these companies achieve top Google rankings without considering what happens next.

Top search rankings do not equal conversion success.

Here’s a hypothetical example. Let’s say you search for “narrow tap shoes” in Google. The top result includes “narrow tap shoes” in its page title and description.

Then you click on the Google display, land on the company’s Web site, and find “narrow tap shoes,” simply repeated several times throughout the banner, headline, main text, footer, etc. The copy itself is practically unreadable.

Unfortunately, this keyword-stuffing strategy is focused on traffic, but it doesn’t help you find what you need; narrow tap shoes.

In addition, the company’s messages are all about how great they are. “We’re the world’s leading tap shoe company … we’re number one, we we we” (you get the picture). There’s very little content about solving the visitors’ need.

You can bet that prospects find no value in this kind of web content and they abandon the site as quickly as possible, looking for someone who can truly help them. It might be the company that shows up #3 or even #7 in Google results.

Therefore, it’s important to keep this approach in mind if you’re focused on developing web content that converts:

1.     Make sure your web content weaves in the 1-3 most relevant key phrases on any given page in an ethical, helpful manner, and

2.     Make sure your web content includes information that’s 100% focused on solving your visitors’ needs. Make it easy for them to convert into customers!

Yes, Google and other search engine results are very important. But they really only matter if your web content converts visitors into customers.

Your brand identity is tied to the design you associate with who you are. Think Apple, Nike, Coke, Polo Ralph Lauren……how is your brand’s design identifing your products and services?

Best Nicole

Your Website is the window into your business’s soul. It’s your brand’s identity, so if the design isn’t measuring up, it’s going to drive people away rather than invite them inside.

Regardless of whether you employ the most talented staff in today’s working world, if your Website or social media profiles don’t employ good marketing design, you’re losing business.

How can you ensure that your site’s design is making the cut? Follow these important guidelines to find out:

Style and tone must match brand personality.
You need to establish a personality that is unique to your brand. If you’re a flower delivery business, you probably wouldn’t want a black-and-brown Website that uses a cryptic font.

Why? Because unless you’re a rare exception to the rule, it doesn’t match the brand personality that’s commonly associated with floral gift arrangements.

But that’s not to say that all flower shops should be pink, green and bubbly. Use your brand personality to establish a style and tone, and use this as a core for designing your Website and social media profiles. This will ensure that your business maintains a credible, professional appearance and as a result, will typically result in a greater number of sales.

Be organized.
Your site must be organized so that people can easily navigate through it. Be sure that your main navigation links and sub-navigation links are straightforward. If you own a clothing store, your main navigation links may be “men’s” and “women’s,” and sub-navigation may include age, styles, seasons, etc. If you’re not sure whether your site is organized well, conduct a trial run with a focus group.

Be functional.
Nothing screams unprofessional like a site with links or other features that don’t work. Be sure that both internal and external links function properly and direct the user to where they say they’ll be directed. If they don’t, you’ll undoubtedly lose customers and business.

Ease of purchase.
People should not have to jump through hoops to buy something from your site. The fewer the clicks it takes to get to check-out, the better.

On the same note, be sure that your checkout process is secure. People are giving you their credit card information in good faith that it will be kept private and protected.

The take away from this story is that digital marketing and social media are about meeting the core needs of YOUR business. Not following the trends. Are you reaching the audiences you are trying to connect to?

Best Nicole

It seems every day a new Web 2.0 service pops up and renders another pre-Internet technology obsolete – from old-fashioned stock listings to the lowly phone book.

But no matter how quickly the Web churns out better, faster and cheaper versions of these services, millions of people still rely on the old, real-life versions. Now several Canadian startups are trying to fuse the old and the new – using the Web to make pre-Web services easier and cheaper. In the process, these startups are also creating a host of innovative new business plans that may change the way small firms make money on the Internet.

Few firms embody the fusion of new and old technology better than Hippopost, a Kitchener-Waterloo startup run by a half-dozen former Research In Motion employees. Hippopost’s service is somewhat similar to Skype – except instead of letting users make free phone calls, Hippopost allows them to send free postcards.

Who sends postcards any more? Americans sent two billion of them last year alone, Hippopost head Donal Byrne says. Indeed, the traditional postcard format has been relatively unchanged for 100 years.

Jennifer Roberts / For The Globe and Mail

Donal Byrne, Bob Millar and Rob Shields of Hippopost, the company that allows you to send free postcards through the mail by tagging each card with an advertisement, pose for photo in Toronto on October 6, 2009.Hippopost works by tagging every postcard with an ad. Users pick a photo from a list, or upload their own, write a message, type in the address of the recipient and Hippopost sends the postcard for free. It arrives about five business days later – Hippopost works with several regional distributors across North America – with an advertiser-branded frame around the front side and a small ad on the back.

“From an advertiser perspective, when was the last time your brand ended up on somebody’s fridge?” Mr. Byrne asks. “It’s almost like smart direct mail.”

One of the most interesting aspects of Hippopost’s business model is the user-selection system of advertising. Once a user enters the address of the recipient, the website offers them a selection of advertisers who sell their product in that area. The idea is that users are more likely to select an ad that’s more relevant to the person they’re sending the postcard to, and advertisers are more likely to want to pay for that added relevancy.

“It’s user-created content meets user-selected advertising,” Mr. Byrne says.

Several big-name advertisers have already signed up, including Expedia and Coca-Cola.

Not surprisingly for a company founded by former RIM employees, Hippopost has already created a BlackBerry application that lets users design and send postcards on the go. The company is working on apps for the iPhone and other platforms too.

“You can be on a ski hill or at a beach, and you can take a picture, write a message and hit send,” Mr. Byrne says. “That’s it.”

And while a five-day wait may seem like an eternity in an instant-messaging age, Mr. Byrne says it does have some advantages for advertisers, allowing them, for example, to extend the marketing lifespan of an event or campaign that would otherwise end much sooner.

While it’s still unclear whether Hippopost will be able to drag the 100-year-old medium into the digital age, early customer reviews are positive, driven in large part by a wired generation’s fascination with the concept of sending a real-life message, for a change.

Press ‘1′ if you’re frustrated

But real life can often be a frustrating place. In Toronto, a small startup is generating big buzz for its work on relieving one of life’s biggest headaches – the much-dreaded customer service phone line.

Just about everybody has experienced the futility of navigating a big company’s telephone system. More often than not, the sound on the other end of the line isn’t the voice of a human being, but a robot or hours of Muzak.

Fonolo, a six-person Toronto startup, wants to change all that. The concept is simple – company CEO Shai Berger calls it “deep dialling.” Users go to the Fonolo website and search for the company they’re trying to call (the Fonolo database has about 500). Once they’ve selected the company, Fonolo presents a list of the most popular destinations for users calling that company.

For example, the listing for Dell includes dozens of entries for customer support and technical assistance. Users choose the department or number they’re trying to reach, enter their own phone number, and Fonolo does the rest. The website dials the number, and when it gets through to the right department, it calls the user, saving them the hassle of going through the phone menu system manually.

“We wanted to tackle a frustration that somebody understood, something really universal,” says Mr. Berger, whose company started with backing from angel investors and is now looking for more. “When we started talking about things that bother us when it comes to using the phone, the concept of phone menus quickly rose to the top.”

Fonolo’s consumer service is entirely free. This summer, the company rolled out a corporate product that uses the same technology, but provides a revenue source. In effect, it allows companies to embed Fonolo’s technology into their websites or mobile applications, thereby improving their own customer experience without doing the expensive and time-consuming work of changing their phone systems.

Much like Hippopost, Fonolo uses a free customer service as a way to attract paying corporate clients.

“The consumer service doesn’t generate revenue, but it serves as an excellent demonstration of the technology,” Mr. Berger says. “It’s a fantastic way to generate awareness and drive potential customers our way, much more effective than me trying to cold call or buy banner ads.”

We want to hear your thoughts. What constitutes “green” to you?

Best Nicole

When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn’t tell the whole story — like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T shirt. Or the possibility that the T shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you still consider the T shirt green? Would you still buy it?

It’s a question that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the debate over what is and isn’t green becomes all-important in a hot and crowded world. That’s because as the global economy has grown, our ability to make complex products with complex supply chains has outpaced our ability to comprehend the consequences — for ourselves and the planet. We evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present. That’s why, when we eat spoiled food, we get nauseated and when we see a bright light, we shut our eyes. But nothing in evolution has prepared us to understand the cumulative impact that imperceptible amounts of industrial chemicals may have on our children’s health or the slow-moving, long-term danger of climate change. Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose — and probably couldn’t make sense of the information even if we had it.

But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That’s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision — and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That’s thinking ecologically — understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. “We can know the causes of what we’re doing, and we can know the impact of what we’re doing,” says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence. “It’s going to have a radical impact on the way we do business.”

Over the past couple of decades, industrial ecologists have been using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) to break down that web of connection. The concept of the carbon footprint comes from LCA, but a deep analysis looks at far more. The manufacture and sale of a simple glass bottle requires input from dozens of suppliers; for high-tech items, it can include many times more.

The good news is that industrial ecologists can now crunch those data, and smart companies like Coca-Cola are using the information to clean up their corporate ecology. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, Coke analyzed its globe-spanning supply chain—the company uses 5% of the world’s total sugar crop—to see where it could minimize its impact; today Coke is on target to improve its water efficiency 20% by 2012.

Below the megacorporate level, start-ups like the website Good Guide are sifting through rivers of data for ordinary consumers, providing easy-to-understand ratings you can use to instantly gauge the full environmental and health impact of that T shirt. Even better, they’ll get the information to you when you need it: Good Guide has an iPhone app that can deliver verdicts on tens of thousands of products. Good Guide and services like it “let us align our dollars with our values easily,” says Goleman.

But ecological intelligence is ultimately about more than what we buy. It’s also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Goleman highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. “We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts,” says Goleman. “Not anymore.”

Ann Handley, author for Mashable.com, writes about what we can learn from these creative and resourceful businesses who understand the power of connecting and engaging with their customers!

Check out some of these incredibly innovative businesses. And they’re all related to street food (something we all love)! Take a break as we can all learn from them.

Hmm time to eat!

Best Nicole

“Twitter* is still a scary, untamed frontier for many businesses,” Fortune wrote last week. I hear a similar refrain from the marketers who are part of the MarketingProfs community: They know that they should be engaging online, but they don’t have the foggiest notion of how to do it.

Lots of businesses on Twitter are doing it right. But, lately, I’ve been finding inspiration less from those companies that have become the poster children for leveraging social media (this means you Comcast, and Zappos, and Dell) and more from the lesser-knowns: not just the little guys, but the littlest of the little guys. I’m talking about street food vendors.

Time was that lunch from street vendors meant limited options. But no more: Street food vendors have expanded both in number and cuisine. In New York City, this growth has recently led to a kind of food fight over turf. But elsewhere, it’s just meant that you can get vegan ice cream sandwiches or East Coast lobster rolls (in San Fran!) as easily as you can score a slice of pizza pie.

Twitter may not be the sole driving source (no pun intended) behind the growth of street food vendors—undoubtedly the economy has done its part to encourage the otherwise unemployed to find an inexpensive way to make a living. But, nonetheless, a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up lessons for any business.

1. Find your target market. (Sometimes, less is more.)

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The best use of Twitter for your business, of course, is to start gathering followers in your target market. Aside from a few exceptions, you won’t find street food vendors on Twitter with tens of thousands of followers, as their target markets are geographically constrained. Rather, street food vendors focus on getting the right followers.

Lunchtime lesson: 1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business than 100,000 less-engaged people.

2. Create demand.

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New York City’s The Treats Truck writes updates so vivid that you can almost smell the cookies and brownies baking. It also does a great job of creating a sense of urgency in a purchase:

Others stay top-of-mind with hungry (or potentially hungry) customers, like the way Food Shark publishes its daily menu of Mediterranean-by-way-of-West-Texas food via Twitter:

Or check out the “food porn” photos shared by Vancouver’s Japanese hot dog stand Japa Dog:

Lunchtime lesson: Communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customers’ needs.

3. Humanize a brand.

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NYC’s Chef Shack (run by two NY chefs) does a great job of monitoring any conversation online. When caterer Molly Hermann praised the truck’s Indian spiced donuts, the Chefs responded:

Profound? Not really. But such simple efforts can go a long way to make customers feel appreciated, and to humanize your business.

Or consider the way Rickshaw Truck, which sells steamed and fried dumplings in Manhattan, fosters a personality behind the brand:

Here’s the way Big Gay Ice Cream Truck shows that the dessert circuit isn’t always a bowl of cherries:

Lunchtime lesson: Be real. Reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.

4. Share news and updates. (Even when it’s bad news.)

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Twitter offers a platform for regular and instant communication. The mobile bake shop known as the Cupcake Truck, in New Haven, CT, publicizes its locations and hours, which change regularly, of course. But even less-portable companies might consider regularly communicating business updates or other news (and how it affects your customers):

Or think about sharing some love by calling out awards and/or customer reviews:

Look at how Seattle’s Skillet Street Food used Twitter to rally customer support when it got into hot water with city officials over permitting issues:

And Durham, NC’s OnlyBurger (”the only burger you’ll ever want”) uses Twitter to keep its customers in the know when things literally break down:

Lunchtime lesson: It might be obvious to share the good stuff with your customers, but consider sharing the less-good, too. Doing so allows your customers to rally around your otherwise sound business. What’s more, your audience will likely respect you more for being honest and forthcoming. (Or, at the very least, you can tell your side of the story.)

5. Gather customer feedback.

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I particularly like the way many food vendors treat their clientele as resources, not just customers. Here, Washington DC’s Streetflow Mobile, which sells frozen yogurt, solicits street intelligence, literally, when it asks its customers about the best place to find city parking:

Lunchtime lesson: Use Twitter to solicit and listen to customer suggestions and opinions. Treat your customers as resources for the kind of feedback that informs product development or other business improvements.

6. Run fun promotions.

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NYC’s Waffletruck regularly runs Twitter-specific special promotions to its followers:

Lunchtime lesson: Take a page from Dell’s playbook on this idea: Use Twitter as a vehicle to run certain social media-based promotions and specials. Your followers will begin to readily anticipate them.

7. Create a sense of community.

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Organizing face-to-face tweetups for Twitter followers is one way of extending your community into the offline world, especially as it will connect your customers to each other (not just you). The nature of that event should reflect your market, of course. Magic Curry Man in San Francisco fostered that sense of customer community by organizing a singles meet up:

Or consider connecting your business to a larger cause, like San Francisco’s UrbanNectar does with its Twitter presence:

Lunchtime lesson: Creating a sense of a customer community around your business furthers your clientele’s engagement with you and your products or services. And connecting your customers with each other strengthens both their relationships with each other as well as with you.

8. Integrate your efforts.

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Twitter is only one tool in the social media shed—or, in this case, one dish at the social-media buffet table. Like any marketing effort by any business, it works best intertwined with other tools in a marketing mix, like a website, or Flickr*, a blog*, YouTube*, or whatever.

Lunchtime lesson: Done well, Twitter is plenty fulfilling for connecting customers with your business on an immediate and intimate level. But it’s even more nourishing when it’s served up as part of a bigger spread.

I find that the many articles I read and post provide a varied perspective; hence, I always include one with my post. I love the posts from Mashable.com as they often include a visual that shows you exactly what the article is speaking about in a step by step manner. Today’s post, by Soren Gordhamer (whose articles I have featured before), provides 4 ways social media is changing business.

For those who have not begun to add social media to the marketing mix, your competition is in the game and engaging relationships with your customers. As I always mention in my social media posts, I am a true believer that success comes with the integration of both traditional and social media. The question for you is: what can you do to succeed in this new era? In the article below are some ideas to get you started. Let us know what is working for you and how you are engaging with your customers to build those transparent, loyal relationships.

Best Nicole

To forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.

Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”

Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.

1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”

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In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook* and Twitter*, to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.

Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.

Lesson: Release fewer “official statements” and more personal ones that help you make a connection to your customers and audience.

2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”

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With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become super important.Loic Le Meur, CEO of startup software company Seesmic*, once told me that one of the most important jobs of a CEO today is to hear what people are saying about the company’s product across social media channels, and to respond to them directly. In fact, much of his Twitter stream is @replies to people commenting on his company’s product.

Bigger companies, such as Southwest Airlines and Comcast are using Twitter in the same way, making sure customers’ concerns are addressed. Because bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.

Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.

3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”

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Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there Nis such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.I am not sure how NBC directs the social media efforts of their employees, but in watching NBC newscaster Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) on Twitter it is clear that she is not simply trying to get people to watch her shows. Curry is someone who speaks out about women’s rights, deeply cares about justice, and likes to quote the Persian poet, Rumi — there is a person there, not a company representative, and as such, I am much more likely to pay attention when and if she does talk about any of her television shows.

John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe, offers another great example. Adobe is a company that smartly encourages and provides the means for their employees to blog, and anyone who reads Nack’s blog will notice that Adobe doesn’t put many restrictions on what people write about. Nack’s blog is focused almost exclusively on his area of interest — graphic design and photo manipulation — but he doesn’t post solely about Adobe products. Many of the interesting art projects and articles he links to have nothing to do with Adobe and some may even have been created using software from competing companies.

Lesson: Forget the unified company image, give staff the freedom to be themselves, and trust that the relationships that they build will help the company in the long run.

4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”

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To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction*. If I want to communicate with a company, I tend to look them up on Twitter first. Knowing that I can communicate with a company on the networks upon which I am already most active makes me feel more comfortable doing business with them, because I know that if I have an issue, there is someone at the company I can communicate with through those means.

Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr*, YouTube*, forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.

Lesson: Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.

The New Business Paradigm in the Age of Social Media

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In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.Businesses who choose not to adapt to the new culture will be at an increasing disadvantage, as their customers slowly build personal relationships with their competitors. We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.

CNNMoney.com posts a great article by Jennifer Alsever about the success that can be attained through negative comments that are shared online by your website. The point: negativity turns out to be a gift to your business, your products and to your current and future customers. What are you waiting for? Engage your customers and ask them to rate your products and services and share them with everyone who comes to your website. Everyone wins! And what could be better then boosting sales via happy customers?

Best Nicole

(Fortune Small Business) — Like many retailers, Jim Hobart knows the value of a good testimonial.

The online store he co-founded, AlpacaDirect.com, always offered a page full of cherry-picked customer comments raving about the site’s alpaca sweaters, socks and yarn. But recently Hobart, 47, decided to take the idea a step further: He hired PowerReviews, whose software lets shoppers write their own product reviews directly on the retailer’s Web site.

It was a risky move for the four-year-old company, based in Brentwood, Calif. Hobart was effectively paying to host bad press — such as posts by customers who described AlpacaDirect’s golf cardigan as “kinda sweaty” and a “poor fit.” Both awarded the cardigan three out of a possible five stars.

But a month after installing the PowerReviews service, Hobart saw sales climb 23% on items that had customer reviews (even that cardigan, which garnered an average of four stars).

“People are really researching their purchases,” he says. “We knew our customers liked our products, and we wanted them to tell one another.”

Online reviews have been spreading ever since Amazon.com (AMZN, Fortune 500) pioneered them in 1997. Witness the rise of “social shopping” Web sites like Kaboodle and ShopWiki and of consumer review sites, including Yelp and Judy’s Book. But today’s customer feedback software is growing more sophisticated, more personal and more affordable for small businesses.

Consumers are becoming used to searching for reviews when they shop online. Internet shoppers rank reviews as the most desired feature of a Web site, according to a recent survey by Forrester Research. “People want to talk among themselves,” says Jacqueline Anderson, a senior consultant at Forrester.

Adds Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, which provides customer satisfaction surveys for Web sites: “If they leave your site to look for reviews, they most likely won’t come back.”

Finding good review software isn’t easy, as Hobart discovered. He was turned on to the idea in 2006 after offering 2,200 AlpacaDirect products via Amazon, where he noticed that products with customer reviews typically sold better. He investigated free review software but decided not to use the programs because they required extensive customization by an IT professional.

Hobart was turned away when he first called San Francisco-based PowerReviews in 2007. At the time, PowerReviews focused on the enterprise market, customizing $1,000- to $2,000-a-month review software for larger retailers such as REI and Staples (SPLS, Fortune 500).

But four months later the company called Hobart back, saying it had changed its mind. A stream of small businesses had been asking for inexpensive, easy-to-install software. “We now think this is a very big market,” says PowerReviews vice president Darby Williams.

Hobart currently pays $80 a month for PowerReviews Express. The software sends e-mails to customers who have made purchases and invites them to submit reviews. The feedback system includes a text box for comments and the all-important five-star rating system. PowerReviews’ staff members read every review and remove posts they deem obscene or libelous. Otherwise, everything is fair game.

It’s important that site owners resist the temptation to edit or delete reviews they don’t like. “If everything is positive, that raises a red flag among consumers,” says Forrester’s Anderson. According to market research firm Keller Fay Group, 87% of consumers tend to write reviews when they have positive things to say.

And even negative reviews can be beneficial. When one customer grumbled that a photo of a yarn spool misrepresented its shade of green, Hobart responded by posting a new photo. He also appended a comment to the negative review saying that the problem had been dealt with.

Ultimately, says Hobart, reviews retain customers. The vast majority of AlpacaDirect’s customers return, so it’s crucial to snag first-timers. “Reviews help build that initial trust,” he says. “They are key to the long-term success of our company.”

Your customer now has the ability to out you to the world (for good or bad) if you are not engaging and connecting with them. Yes…that means listening to them and addressing their needs and concerns.  Ann is not stopping here—she is now creating a debtors revolt website and will continue her crusade to include tax revolt. Lookout!

I am attaching her second video where she shares the response she received from the Bank of America Vice President. This video is part of Huffington Post’s reporter, Arthur Delany’s, article.

Is your company out there? Are you engaging and listening to your customer? If not…they are certainly watching you and ready to tell the world!

Best Nicole