Sneeze It

Leveraging your Market (Lessons From Comic Con)

I had the chance recently to attend New York’s famous Comic Con with my daughter—the largest, most unconventional, and exciting pop culture event on the east coast. Unbeknownst to me, it was so much more than just comics—as booths featured the latest in anime, graphic novels, video games, toys, movies, and manga (a style of Japanese comics and graphic novels aimed at adults). Additionally there were other associated products one might not have visualized before attending—like 3D printing, fantasy food trucks, and even “Walking Dead” figurines and collectibles.

Brand Partnerships that Make Sense

There were a lot of brand partnerships on display that I thought were smart business decisions—like Pizza Hut and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or high-end makeup line Mac and the Simpsons. There’s even an online tutorial that can show you how you can use Mac products to get Marge Simpson’s look!

Invite Your Competition In

I spent a lot of time after the convention thinking about large-scale marketplaces and the many ways customers can leverage their businesses by teaming up with other related service providers to form one community. We are often so incredibly afraid of embracing our competition, but an event like Comic Con—where 150,000 people walk through a flea market type setting—allows audiences to see artists, products, and services they may not have known about before and make their own informed decisions.

SEO Is Not Dead

Since the onset of Penguin and the climactic changes taking place in the online world, we’ve heard it said repeatedly, in the voice of gloom and doom, that SEO is dead. In fact, SEO today is more important than ever before. With so much riding on the correct layout of your pages, your navigation and your overall search engine visibility, SEO is an important part of our website plan.

SEO is not the same as once it was, that much is true. The ability to build links and to have them count as the vote that they were at one time in a search is simply no longer an option. Your best option, as opposed to this kind of linking, to building bad links, was then and still is to network your site to get it noticed, to build the best SEO that you can into your site, and to work in such a way that your customers, your prospective buyers and the search engines who visit your site know that you’ve done the absolute best that you can to give them a positive experience.

SEO is an Important Part of Your Website Design.

Creating a site that the search engines can easily spider and that people will be able to quickly find and use is what SEO is all about. While the methods which are being used are less like those which were used even two years ago, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In the old days, marketers were using methods that were “in your face” and quite often in violation of what Google, Yahoo, and Bing said was the right thing to do. Links which were not relevant and should not have counted for anything at all were being read as offering rank to the sites in question. It is correct, and is it positive to say, that kind of SEO is in fact dead and, may we add, it’s about time.

Relevant links which are arrived at by networking with sites that are relevant or related to your own, are typically those which count the most heavily. That means that your prospective customer can follow links from your site to another, or from another site to you and get more information on their chosen topic. Those are quality links and they mean something to both the search engines and the people who are seeking more information on that topic.

On page meta tags, quality article writing that does not show overuse of keywords and offers solid and quality information are going to get your site noticed while at the same time giving you the kind of traffic that your site needs to keep you moving forward.

Social media also counts, as well it should. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and many other sites such as Pinterest are going to give you extra traffic and extra notice when you add links out to your sites. Make sure that you’re at least doing rudimentary social networking in order to get the best that you can from your website.

Is SEO Dead? In reality some aspects of SEO, specifically the aspects which were not giving the user a good experience, are in fact dead. But SEO as a whole is alive and well and more important than ever before.

How to Maximize Customer Service on Twitter

Twitter is by far the most up-and-coming customer service channel for brands who want to provide near real-time support, as well as show the Twitterverse that they are a customer-centric brand.

However, like other customer service channels, it is important to monitor performance in terms of response time and satisfaction rate. WaveMetrix has looked at some of the best practices from brands that are successfully providing support on Twitter, to help other brands understand where to start and how to go about it.

The first step is to make sure you have a brand-centric Twitter account (handle) and a separate dedicated support account, rather than combining customer service with brand-centric discussions on one handle. For example, Delta Air Lines has a @Delta handle where they post competitive information, fun facts and news about the company. Alongside this, their @deltaassist handle deals with customer complaints and queries.

Similarly, T-Mobile has a brand-centric @TMobile handle to share news of sponsorships, contests or new products, whilst @TMobilehelp deals with complaints.

Having a dedicated Twitter support handle helps channel negativity away from your main brand space, where you should be focusing on building positive brand engagement.

The second step is to make sure you are responding to complaints in a timely manner and to compare your performance with the rest of your industry. Consumers expect a fast response on social channels as they would with a call center. Every unanswered complaint represents negative buzz about your brand until you address it.

Analysis of average response time on dedicated support handles shows that they enable faster responses compared with brands that don’t separate the two:

• 74% of complaints on dedicated support handles get a response within four hours, versus only 51% of complaints on single brand handles

Finally, you should measure what proportion of positive consumer tweets your support handle is getting to see whether customers are giving positive feedback about your service. There are strategies which can help increase the amount of positive feedback you get. For example, Delta, HP and Bank of America used naming reps, which gets them a higher proportion of positive feedback than competitors as the relationships feel more personal:

     

These are just a few steps to building customer relations through Twitter. Read more details about WaveMetrix’s customer service best practices by downloading the PDF paper here. Or contact Leonie Bulman at [email protected]

This study was conducted using the traditional WaveMetrix methodology, combining technology to measure response time and reach, with 100% human coding to analyse sentiment and topic.

Why your social media strategy should be like Festivus!

As we prepare for the holidays and start looking ahead to 2013, it’s a great time to think about how you’re going to differentiate in the marketplace and take advantage of social media networking next year.  It’s also a chance to reflect on the business practices that have worked for you and to discontinue the ones that weren’t effective.  So naturally, this made me think of Festivus!

Diehard fans of Seinfeld will recall that Festivus was a holiday that as a kid, Jerry Seinfeld’s friend George Costanza was forced to celebrate on December 23 instead of Christmas like most of his friends. His father, disillusioned by the commercialization of Christmas decided he was going to create his own holiday so instead of a tree he put up a metal pole, and at each Festivus Dinner, he’d begin with the Airing of Grievances and followed dinner with the annual Feats of Strength.  It was just that simple. The holiday others continued to celebrate didn’t satisfy him, so he set out to create his own.

Mr. Costanza was onto something… Year after year we follow our competitors and watch them celebrate their wins in the market place from using the same old tactics. We continue to try and beat them at the same tired game or go along for the ride but if we dared to be different, had engaging content, and created new social media strategies, we’d have our own Festivus!  Why keep trying to fit into the same mold when you can use your social media resources creatively and beat your competition on your own terms? If you aren’t winning on their playing field, change the game and win on your home turf.

Now is the time. Clear the air of grievances, tap into your strengths, and dig into your social media sites to find the platforms that work best for your business. Do something, anything, that’s going to make you stand out and get your audience’s attention.  If you do, you’ll likely see a shift occur and soon your competitors will be catch up to you. So I say get in there and think outside the box and I wish a happy holiday to all and Happy Festivus to the rest of us!

Getting Ready for Israel…My trip down memory lane!

The mission of the Young President Organization (YPO) is Better Leaders Through Education and Idea Exchange”™ and it’s that core value that I’ve been honored to be a part of through the years. One of my passions in life is teaching and thanks to YPO and many successful corporations, I’ve been able to be a keynote speaker and share my knowledge of sales and social media marketing.

On December 27 I’ll once again be speaking for YPO’s Israel chapter and addressing members on the topic, “It’s not what innovative technology does for people; it’s what the innovative people  do with technology.”  In preparing for this presentation I became a bit nostalgic and came to realize exactly how much technology has actually helped shape my career. So, I thought I’d share my personal path and take you along for a brief ride down memory lane.

In 1981 there was a communication revolution, though it wasn’t heard by many people, it starting was a turning point in my life.  That was the year the Hayes Smart modem was introduced.  Some of you may recall that 30+ years ago there was no such thing as broadband and computers communicated through telephone lines.  You’d pick up a phone, dial a number (of another computer), rest the handset on the modem and then you’d be able to log into a mainframe computer.

What the Hayes Smart Modem enabled you to do was dial a number without the use of a phone and it could auto answer if another modem was calling.  That’s all I needed to come up with an idea and then put it into motion by creating a Bulletin Board System, BBS, on my TRS-80 Color Computer by Radio Shack.

I guess you can say, “Once a techie always a techie.” Even before I created BBS I was interested in computers and networking. As early as sixteen years old, I worked for a computer software store to support my technology habit.  It was there that I got my first experience in sales -  I was the #1 salesperson in the #1 store in the country.  But it wasn’t because I knew how to sell (that came later), I simply understood very early on that you need to have a good message and a network to share it with. Although it was many years later, that’s exactly how I built Sneeze.it,  my social marketing company.  We build the core messages, share the social media tips and help businesses find their way into the social media world.

Why all the tech talk? Well, I think the saying goes, “It’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”  BBS systems though archaic, were the predecessor of the social media applications we use today.  When I look back it’s  apparent to me that a lot of the strategies now used  for marketing online stem from the one underlying principal that supports these extremely effective, tight knit online communities -- content. No matter the social media platform, if you’ve got quality content that gets your audience’s attention then you’re ahead of the game. Couple that with a good social marketing plan and consistency in messaging and you’ve got innovation joining technology. This is what I try to convey when I’m presenting – today’s technology makes it convenient to share your products and services virally, but if your content isn’t up to snuff, it won’t matter where you publish it.   

After all, when you strip away the polished interfaces of modern day social media applications  you’re left with your core message, and that can get lost in the shuffle in our digital world.  I hear it all the time at these events and when working with new clients. They know about Facebook, Twitter and other popular sites, but they can’t seem to figure out why they aren’t reaching more people. Which brings us full circle and back to my prepping for Israel. If you want to grow a garden, you have to plant the seeds and water the flowers –I can’t wait to get help the YPO Israel team cultivate growth. Thankfully, it will probably be from a laptop or an Ipad and not a tin box with a monitor that resembles a television.  You’ve got to love progress!