Business is like dating (no really). In religious Jewish circles, there is a form of dating called "shidduch dating," where the potential mates are set up based on common interests and marriage potential. After a few dates (and sometimes only one) the parties both know whether the relationship is going anywhere, and in as soon as a one to three months, they can know whether they will be married; sometimes they are married in this short space of time.
It may sound a bit foreign to secular folks, but shidduch dating can produce great and healthy marriages. In business, creating customer relationship, especially through social media is a lot like shidduch dating. You present your business to the matchmaker, i.e., the social media platform, hoping that your great match will be everyone. Just as when dating you ask questions to get to know your potential partner. Then reality hits, and you find that not everyone is for you; the customer, your true love, belongs to a smaller segment than you thought and you focus your efforts on serving them. You find your true love, in Hebrew we call this "besheret," and these people are your evangelists. You are lucky to have them because they will gladly tell proclaim their love for your products to the world (there are fewer marketing opportunities as great as this). This is getting married.
Of course you have to continue to grow with your customers for the relationship to mature and last. It is a continuous series of "what can I do for you, customer, my love? How can I be of maximum service to making your life better? When this is your focus, you will be able to spend 120 years in a great marriage with your customers.
Check out these slides from a talk I gave on this topic:
28. Work with My Media Labs on Your Social Media Campaign Direct Contact Online Networks Email: [email_address] Website: http://mymedialabs.com Phone (Israel): 052-591-6816 Twitter: http://twitter.com/mhtweets Phone (US): 973-883-1064 Linkedin: http://il.linkedin.com/in/mikemintz
Hinweis der Redaktion
BEFORE WE BEGIN: write on board or have projected – write down three simple sentences that describe your business.
Lots of choices out there. Evaluate your needs: What type of business are your? Product v. Service, Storefront v. Online, etc. Where are your customers? How do you determine the demographics of your sales opportunities? Research? Asking them? Alexa? Analytics? Facebook Ad Tool? What’s your best approach? Twitter = broadcast to deepening relationships Blog = subject matter expertise and relationship building with readers Facebook Page = visible hub for community management
Owner meet your business. Simple questions can really help determine what social media choices you should make (adapted from Sonia Simone’s “Really Simple Business Plan”): Who are the right customer, where are they now, and how will they find us? What are we really selling to these customers, and how can we communicate that in a unique way on different media platforms? What problem do we solve for the customer? Does it solve a real problem people care about solving, and if so, why do they care about this? What does the product need to do? How do we make that exciting for customers? How will we make money? Can any money be generated from our social media activities? What else can you sell these customers later? What do we need to worry about now to avoid headaches later? Execution: whose going to do the work to make this work and how? Do we need anyone extra to handle our social media activities? What makes sense to start doing today? List your next actions. One of the biggest social media mistakes is to assume you need to do everything and be everywhere with equal force. Large multi-national corporations can maybe think like this, and most of them don’t even do social media so well, but smaller businesses need to focus on what’s best for them based on the answers to their simple business plan.
When you get honest it is important to know who your customers are. The next step is to find where they are. In some cases, they are closer than you think. Define the demographic who are your main customers (don’t say “everybody” b/c then you’re just lying”) Research your target customers doing a general search for information on where they consume information (online, social networks, Twitter, mobile, etc.) - Alexa Analytics and Facebook Ads Tool (see next slide)
Facebook ads are one of the best ways of finding your market locally. Plus they force you to think concisely and of messaging that will work immediately with your audience. Here are the steps for creating a Facebook Ad: Write Your Copy – you get 25 characters for the title, 135 characters for your body text, and an image Determine Your Targeted Audience – narrow down by country or countries, city, age, sex, likes & interests, relationships and marital status, languages, work status, and place of employment. The best part is it gives you a self-updating widget (boxed in red) that tells you how many people you are estimated to reach with each criteria. Name a Price –there are two options for FB advertising (from advertising FAQ): “Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising allows you to specify a certain amount that you are willing to pay each time a user clicks on your ad. Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) advertising allows you to specify how much you are willing to pay for 1000 impressions (views) of your ad. As a CPC advertiser you are indicating that what is most important to you is having people click through to your website and controlling the actual cost to drive each individual person to your site. As a CPM advertiser you are indicating that it is more important to you that many people see your ad, not that they actually take action after seeing your ad. CPM advertising is usually more effective for advertisers who want to raise awareness of their brand or company, while CPC advertising is more effective for advertisers who are hoping for a certain response from users (like sales or registrations)."
EXERCISE: Create a Facebook Ad That Will Get Customers (10-minutes) Break up into groups depending on size of class Take the three sentences you wrote at the beginning and share them with the group Choose 1-business and create a Facebook Ad for it 25 character title 135 character body text Image (describe, draw, or share if you have it) AFTER 10 MINUTES – each team gets 3 minutes to present their ad (if possible, run it through FB to see reach)
This is all about building a community whether it’s in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups, wherever. The important thing is that you create an inner circle that is nuts about your brand, brings their friends in, and keeps the excitement about your product going. Rewarding these customers with exclusives is key, and the reason I like to consider Facebook as a first choice for community building and marketing is because of the following statistics.
Facebook has over 550,000,000 members 700,000 new members are added every day 1 out of 12 people on planet Earth are on Facebook 75 languages are spoken on the network 70% of Facebook users are outside the US If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world 1 out of every 4 American page views last month were on Facebook (25% of all Internet page views!) 50% of Facebook users log on daily Average users have 130 friends - interesting sidebar from Time magazine essay about Facebook: "Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle - about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar.” Over 700 billion minutes per month are spent on Facebook (the average lifespan of a human is only 40,840,000 minutes) Average users make 90 contributions per month to Facebook (more than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month) The purpose of sharing these facts is not to convince you to use Facebook, so much as to demonstrate the opportunities available on member sites like it. In fact, Xing, the most popular site in Asia is even larger and more active than Facebook.
Facebook Pages are the place for a business to create a hub and build a community with their customers. It is most important to know what you want out of your Facebook page. Is it to collect email addresses, drive traffic to your product website, or generate Likes so that updates to your page are published in the newsfeed of your fans (that’s what’s happening here)? Regardless of what you want, a strong call to action is needed. In drafting a strong call to action, think of what you did for the Facebook ad. Whatever you do needs to be clear, concise, and creative to get people to do what you want when they come to your page.
Like rats running a maze, you can create incentives for your potential fans to Like you before you even do anything for them. The clicking of a Like button is less obtrusive than traditional “give your email to get a free report” tactic, and if you are offering something interesting on the other side of the curtain, fans will be happy to click to get in. Here’s how it works: “there’s a cute FBML code to hide content from non-fans and show it when they click “Like” button. By using the code you can have people like your page just out of human curiosity.” You then couple that with a creative offering and you’ve got a winner.
The nice thing about Facebook as a community platform is that Pages support multimedia. You can easily embed video, slide shows, audio, and interactive offerings. This makes Pages a flexible and dynamic option for businesses that don’t want to start developing or overhauling a website. In face Guy Kawasaki, famous for his books Reality Check and The Macintosh Way, chose to market his newest book Enchantment. Note that you can embed YouTube video in your page as well – YouTube is a great platform for some with a lot of potential for creating viral buzz (we can do a whole seminar just on that).
Invest some money in a graphic
When you are selling to Businesses, starting a Facebook fan page may not be the best route. In this environment try going with a group on Linkedin about subject matter relevant to your products. The NBN page is mostly used for career building and networking among new olim.
The Answers database on LinkedIn is a great way to establish yourself as a domain expert. That is of course if you have the expertise and answer people’s questions well. Top Experts are displayed prominently on the site (she answered 557 questions this week!), and I know people who have generated loads of referrals by climbing to the top of this list.
Big commitment which is not easy to maintain Good for establishing expertise and subscriber relationships (can monetize as well) Consistency and finding voice is key
Pick a blogging tool that gives you enough flexibility to do advance functions as you learn them, but is simple enough to get started right away. WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr are all examples of different tools Paid v. Free Plugins extend the abilities of your blog – you can create a whole website out of plugins and a blogging platform.
Not easy Editorial schedule helps – plan and write posts in chunks. Use the scheduling tool to post them and have them publish at a date in the future while you write new posts Come up with formulas for writing: 3 paragraph (intro issue/my take/conclusion of how things will turn out); Yes, And blogging, Product Review The key is to keep writing no matter what (advice I should heed on all my blogs)
Tell story about pottery class: 1 group of students make 1 perfect pot (graded on quality); other group make as many pots as possible before semester over (ended up with better quality pots than other class). RSS, Twitter, Facebook – link together
Megaphone v. Telephone Follow topics quickly News feeder Link builder
Keep a healthy follow to followed ratio: why you shouldn’t follow everyone Lists to follow topics
Forces brevity
Marketing to Customers Patience/presence is important as relationship - Build overtime/offer logical hooks into buying