Category Archives: Social Media Management

Managing Your Online Reputation, Step One: Show Up.

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Jack Monson| 3 Comments
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Online Reputation Management. Is there any other kind of reputation management anymore?

The days of your brand’s reputation making the rounds via word of mouth – true word of mouth, as in one-on-one live human conversations – are over. Many brands are nostalgic for the days when unhappy customers did not have an open channel to millions of other consumers at their fingertips.

But don’t be disheartened when someone does ding you on Twitter or other places online. Even the hottest brands have detractors. The ubiquitous nature of Social Media means that if no one is complaining about your products or services, then no one is using your products or services.

The good news is – for now – that you will improve your online reputation among potential customers by just showing up. Perhaps consumers are so used to brands ignoring negative comments that the simple acknowledgement of a problem seems heroic.

Showing up also means more than just monitoring and reporting on what’s being said. Lurking in the background and reporting on what consumers are saying won’t help your reputation; engaging in the online conversation will.

Don’t ignore anything. Acknowledge every complaint, question, or remark on social channels. Your legal department will disagree. But remember, this isn’t just about the one complaining customer. It’s about the thousands or millions of consumers who see your response (or lack of) in feeds or search results. Many of them will base their opinion of your brand and future buying decisions on your response.

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Consumer Reviews, Social Media Management, Social Media Monitoring

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Social Media Recap of the Week

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Jennifer MacDonald| 1 Comment
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Did you hear that Google+ is the new Enterprise Social Network? They’re making big strides in becoming the social network you can’t live without.

Want to get your inbox to ZERO? It’s possible, here are a few tools to help.

Do you believe in Social Media Optimization? I compiled a case study of our clients’ usage to prove that it works, thanks to SocialFlow. Take a look and see for yourself, data doesn’t lie. If you’re still not convinced join me on September 13th for a webinar with the head of Research & Development at SocialFlow as we dive further into the data discussion.

What did you discover this week?

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Engage121 Clients, Google+, Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing, Twitter

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Use Case: Brand and Reputation Management

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Engage121| Leave a comment
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Wild Birds Unlimited® owners are their local communities’ backyard birdfeeding specialists and a premiere source for nature information, as well as quality products. But who we are goes far beyond the items we sell. Wild Birds Unlimited has more than 275 stores throughout the United States and Canada.

Use 1: Wild Birds mistakenly went down the path of trying to comment against a politically charged topic. (Rush Limbaugh) Instead of receiving the support they thought they would, it quickly turned into a pissing contest between both sides. WBU quickly jumped back into action with the use of Engage121 content publishing and apps to redirect the message back to their core competency, birds. By showcasing great picture content and bird education through various Engage121 assets and apps, WBU quieted the fire and returned WBU to their business.

Use 2: Wild Birds Unlimited through the sharing of their expertise has grown into an industry matter expert on subjects relating to birds through able long-term use of their account. They have slowly become a resource on Facebook for the hobby of all pertaining to birds, thus now a peer support resource. Their vast expertise and wise use of Engage121 to manage these efforts have driven meaningful relationships like Cornell as a resource partner.

Topic support questions include; Why you shouldn’t pick up and take a baby bird. A popular topic that has become a content point within their Engage121 library amongst other popular points that their franchisees have access to and reuse.

 

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Engage121 Clients, Facebook, Social Media Management, Social Media Monitoring

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Manage Projects and Tasks in Engage121′s new Calendar

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Engage121| Leave a comment
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We’ve published an update to the planner in support of our new Projects functionality set. Our new Projects tools allow our Clients and our Client Experience team to create projects that are made up of multiple tasks. In addition, project tasks can be assigned to multiple Engage121 users. This allows our clients to keep track of who is responsible for which parts of a project and track the project’s progress over time.

Now when you log into Engage, you’ll see a Manage button in the planner bar:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clicking on the Manage button will bring up a window with all the previously available Events functionality, the new Projects functions, and expanded Filters functionality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Projects tab you can create new projects and assign tasks connected to that project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When editing a task as the assigner or assignee, the user can change the status of the task and add a note about the status.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under Filters, the Coverage filters persist, but we can now also filter the planner view by project to quickly review the import dates related to a project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Engage121 Clients, Engage121 Product Features, Social Media Management, Software updates

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Leverage the Power of Social Media for Real-Time Customer Service

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Engage121| 1 Comment
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We are very excited to tell you about our new Customer Care feature that we have integrated into the Engage121 application. Starting today this feature will be available to all Engage121 clients. Below is a recorded webinar showing you how the Customer Care feature will work. Later this week there will be six specific videos highlighting key functions in Customer Care. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Engage121’s Customer Care helps clients achieve a higher level of client service satisfaction, more efficiently, with game-changing features like:

The Broadest Range of Content
Benefit: Building a great Customer Care capability begins with capturing the broadest range of customer conversations in social media. Engage121 aggregates content from all channels where your customers are speaking, including social platforms, blogs, RSS feeds, over forty rating and review sites and more, delivering one of the most comprehensive socially powered Customer Care capabilities available today.

Case Creation
Benefit: The Engage121 case creation feature gives you the ability to capture customer concerns in real-time, allowing you to provide immediately responsive service to your customers. Once a customer care issue has been identified, one click develops a case name, subject and customer identity.

Case Management
Benefit: Engage121 provides a dedicated Customer Care dashboard that enables comprehensive case management across time zones, product teams and user permissions.

Permissions Management
Benefit: Engage121 furthers your ability to manage social Customer Care by assigning specific permissions to your users. This provides better management controls over compliance guidelines for staff, when engaging with customers.

Case Reporting
Benefit: No Customer Care application would be complete without the ability to report and measure the key metrics of your efforts. Engage121 makes it possible to review and assess your social customer service efforts, both on a user basis and in the aggregate.

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Customer Service, eLearning Calendar, Engage121 Product Features, Social Media Management

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Weekly Social Media Roundup, April 20th

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Jennifer MacDonald| Leave a comment
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Shouts out to Tumblr making it’s application accessible for Brands to monitor, unlock prizes when you tweet about the Olympics & Gartner Inc. names their cool vendors for CRM Customer Service & Social.

What did you discover?

Tumblr and Gnip partner to provide businesses access to public posts
Getting Ready for the Social Media Olympics
Engage121 Earns a spot on Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in CRM Customer Service and Social 2012″ List

 

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing, Social Media News, Twitter

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We’re here to help . . . Facebook

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Jon Victor| 3 Comments
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It has been almost a year since Facebook announced support for “Parent/Child” businesses. The businesses this functionality targets, which include franchise companies, multi-store retailers, dealerships and the like, are typically nationally branded companies that distribute through local outlets. In other words, the very same companies that are just like many of our clients here at Engage121.

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Facebook widely publicized its support of Parent/Child pages at the recent International Franchise Association conference in Orlando, this functionality is not yet well understood. So, let’s clarify what Parent/Child can do:

• Perhaps most importantly, the administrator of a corporate (“Parent”) page can efficiently upload multiple local outlets to Facebook, automatically creating local (“Child”) pages for each of their outlets. In the past, we have had to manually create local pages. And, that was time consuming and expensive. Facebook has now made this as easy as completing a spreadsheet and hitting a button.

• The Parent page is automatically linked to all Child pages. This enables some useful functionality, especially on the Parent page. For example, check-ins from all Child pages are aggregated, users can search for the location of the closest physical outlet and a tab is created detailing all outlet locations. Also, each Child page links back to the Parent, and consistency of branding is enabled among all the pages by sharing images.

Facebook provides a great start. And there is a lot we can do to help.

Let’s start with the content creation process. It is well known that social media content gets stale, fast. And, as previously noted, EdgeRank conspires against dated content by increasingly limiting the distribution of content as it ages. To complicate matters, operators of local business come to work every morning ready to sell shoes, make pizza or fix cars. They don’t come to work thinking about social media, or any other kind of media for that fact. Engage121 allows corporate teams to create content that can be localized to each local store or office, providing a continual flow of new, fresh and relevant content.

What about Facebook apps? How many local stores care to manage the development of Facebook apps? Engage121 enables a corporate team to create contests, coupons and more that each local store can customize, if desired, or post to their fan page as is – engaging their local fans with technology and sophistication equal to any of the big national brands.

And, Facebook ads are lost on most of the local stores we know. They are turned off by Facebook’s complicated interface and intimidating process. Inside Engage121, however, local stores follow a simple wizard that produces a variety of paid promotions that play an increasingly important role in today’s social media world.

My bottom line – Facebook’s Parent/Child provides targeted companies a great start. And, we can help make Parent/Child even more usable for nationally-branded companies that maintain local stores or outlets.

 

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Engage121, Engage121 Clients, Engage121 Product Features, Facebook, Marketing Tools, Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing

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Reports of the Death of Facebook Tab Applications

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Jon Victor| 1 Comment
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Almost as soon as Facebook had finished unveiling its new Timeline, marketers were abuzz about the death of Tab Applications.

I received a call earlier today from a member of our team. He wanted to know what I thought we should tell our clients, many of whom use Engage121 to develop and manage Tab applications. Are Tab applications dead? He heard the buzz.

Well, I’m not sure the buzz is correct. The death of Facebook Tab applications may be greatly exaggerated – if not premature.

So, what prompted the buzz?

Facebook’s redesign moved Tabs from a conspicuous position on the left-hand panel, readily viewable by anyone who arrives on a brand’s landing page, to almost hidden under a drop-down box on the right side of the new Page. Taken at “face” value – almost a pun there – Tabs are certainly less obvious to the user. But, I don’t think this is an effort by Facebook to kill Tab applications. That said, I also do not believe Facebook’s relocation of Tabs was unintentional.

The key to understanding what is going on here is to recognize that Facebook has made Tab applications very accessible to users through ads. As reported on “Inside Facebook”

“Advertisers can still run Facebook campaigns that drive to third-party tab applications . . . This type of ad can be used to drive traffic to promotions or commerce features within tab applications.”

Facebook is very deliberately, and carefully, redesigning the user experience to encourage marketers to pay for connecting a brand and its fans.

So, in response to the question above – are Tab applications dead? – I think the answer is probably “No.” But, applications have been monetized – by Facebook.

 

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Posted in Facebook, Marketing, Social Media Management, Social Media Monitoring

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Social Media enables us to “tell a story” about our brands like no other platform can.

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Jennifer MacDonald| 2 Comments
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Guy Kawasaki (former executive for Apple) was “awe-inspiring” at IFA, driving “real” meaning to the Social Media discussion and debate over usability.  He explained social media “practically” and elaborated on how social media enables us to “tell a story” about our brands like no other platform can.

He began by explaining that to transform your brand into a masterpiece, such as Apple did, your brand must successfully accomplish three factors in the social media: Likeability, Trustworthiness and Quality.

Guy suggested that by using these three factors, you can add personality to your brand and emotionally touch your consumer. As all of us iPhone users know, we do not own an iPhone exclusively for its millions of apps that enhance our lives, but because of the sleek and elegant design. It’s sexy; it makes us feel sexy, intelligent, productive and successful. The aura around Apple products makes you feel that you will not live another day if you do not own one. As brand proprietors, we should all aspire to do this for our brands.

You might ask…How was that message conveyed when it is attached to a piece of technology? By putting a story behind the message and finding the right people to tell that story; not just twitter users with 10,000+ followers, but those with only fifteen.  They are the tweeps who have the time to write about your product and become passionate about your brand.

Guy also mentioned, “Solving problems”. Guy explains the Apple problem/solution… “You’ve created your computer company because the only way you could access a computer was to visit a library, you thought there must be a better way, so you launched Apple.” Your computer company has just solved an everyday problem.

Guy also explained the importance of input and reciprocation.  Start with asking your customers for their support, even if they’ve already given it to you. After they’ve re-tweeted you, proceed to say thank you, then tweet them a link to a customer survey. People want to help you; you just need to let them know how. They want to feel that their input matters and is valued.  After you’ve received their input, keep in mind, it’s CRITICAL to reciprocate… ask how you might help them; this becomes your opening to the continuing dialogue.

A few more takeaways:
ENGAGE & DO IT FAST: Each post lasts 2-3 hours, so hurry!
SELL YOUR DREAM: Enchant your customer; don’t focus on money/product dump; tell a STORY to sell your product.
REMOVE THE SPEED BUMPS: Make it easy for your customer to connect with you, especially online.

“Social Media is a means to an end; the end game is enchantment of your customer.  Social Media isn’t the only way, it’s ONE GREAT way.”

I would love to hear your takeaways, please post them below.

 

 

 
- Jennifer MacDonald, Director of Community & Client Engagement

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Posted in Community Manager Tips, Facebook, Franchising, Google+, Marketing, Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring, Twitter, What's new - Marketing

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