KeyNote Speech for Talk Social Manchester on how brands can use social media to engage with customers and develop relatinships

1. Developing Engagement &
Relationships for your Brand
David Edmundson-Bird
Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing & Enterprise
Manchester Metropolitan University

2. Who do I think I am?
• David Edmundson-Bird (formerly just “Bird”)
– Now a nice “Search Engine-Friendly” name
– You’ll find me as “groovegenerator” anywhere
• Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing at MMU
• Opened Manchester’s 2nd Web Design Agency
(Sozo) in 1995
• Chief Learning Architect at Academee 1999 –
2002
• Background in AI for Strategic Decision-
Making/Military Context

3. Developing Engagement &
Relationships with Brands
• 4 approaches with managing relationships
– Personal connections
– Brand monitoring
– Evangelists (Citizen Marketers)
– Improving Customer Support
• Practical activity practices

4. MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS

5. Personal Connections in B2B/High
Value B2C
• Manage personal connections through a social
CRM approach
– Traditional (i.e. birthdays/favourite
things/hobbies/family) can stagnate
– Integrate with Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter
• Tip for sole/freelancer/SME - use Xobni
• GetSocial Twitter Pro in SugarCRM
– See clients last 20 tweets
– React to a tweet to maintain currency/relevancy
– Turn tweets into actual cases

6. Brand Monitoring
• According to Nielson Buzzmetrics
– 25% Search results for top 20 brands link to UGC
• Customers use Social Media for
praise/crit/review/feedback
• Companies who interact create more positive
impression
– Can increase leads into sales funnel
– But don’t do this at the expense of other proven
conversion tools (email, SEO)

7. Evangelist Tracking
• IDing evangelists is a cheap effective way of
boosting promotions and marketing
– They spread the word unconditionally
• Most companies don’t pick up on this yet
• You can easily rank customers based on the
activity and positivity of their messaging
– Integrate this into CRM to enable management
• Your biggest critics are also sometimes your
biggest fans – “squeaky wheels”

8. Improving Customer Support
• Integrating Twitter into CRM allows for monitoring of keywords -
see how a customer views you
– Move the posts into customer support
• Pacification
• Support pre-sales
• Squeaky wheels
– Quickly respond to anger/reduce viral impact
• Pre-sales support
– Trial usage where frustration causes abandonment
– Customers can post questions
• Monitoring/response enhances likelihood of conversion
– Creates a positive impression
• Again an area where the mass of marketers and organisations have
yet to make an impression

9. PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY PRACTICE

10. Professional Activity Practice
• You can implement these practically
• Designed to be conducted when you need to
minimise "media spend" but have “prepaid-
for” human assets

11. Send the Right Message to the Right
Audience in the Right Channel
• This isn't necessarily a scientific venture
• If you "broadcast" (i.e. you don't know your
audience), you waste effort
• When you broadcast to everyone, you're
talking to no one
– On Twitter, don't just randomly tweet
– Time spent understanding who will hear your
message will help

12. Social Media Engagement = Human
Relationship Building
• It takes time
• It's like finding the right life partner
– You shouldn't be snogging within 3 minutes of
meeting
– Trust is important to create
• You have to create trust before you get any brand
loyalty
– If you start "selling" before you've built that trust,
you'll fail

13. Quality Engagement over Quantity of
Communications
• Customers prefer 1 meaningful tweet than 10
pointless ones
– Think "Information Overload”
• Don't tweet things that are irrelevant (unless
your culture)
• Think of timing
– For consumers, after 20:00h might be too late or
intrusive
• Depends on your offering

14. 90/10 Content Rule
• 90% of the content you post should be
engaging rather than promotional.
• 10% can be used for promotions
– You can only engage if you know who you are
talking to.

15. Engagement Point Scale for Facebook
• A scale from 1 to 100
– Think of a “Share” as being worth 90 points,
– A “Comment” being worth 9 points and
– A “Like” being worth 1 point.
• Make your FB posts be short & sweet.
– Try not to overdo the frequency of posting.
– 2/3 posts per day seem optimal depending on
your offering.

16. Be Consistent & Responsive
• Respond promptly to the comments or
suggestions of your followers
• Do not ever delete a critical comment from your
Facebook page
– This only leads to an even angrier customer
• Other customers will join in
– Respond immediately with courtesy and address the
issue in a straightforward manner
• Customers who complain and are then satisfied
are up to 8% more loyal than if they had no
problem at all

17. Imagery and Video
• Pictures/Video generate 40% greater
engagement than word posts
– Consider Pinterest as a tool to share rather than
just another channel to monitor.
• Using video?
– Make it shorter than 90 seconds.
• Shooting your own video using cheap tools?
– Hold the camera vertically
– Make sure the audio is spot-on

18. Keep your Website
• Use your site as an info repository
• Don’t use your site to engage and attract but
to covert and retain

19. Expertise
• Use experts to manage a twitter chat
– Become the place to come to
– Chats are great for growing a customer base
organically

20. Engagement Tools
• Loads of people use Hootsuite
– Use the add-ons
– Track/Share campaigns
– Look for trending content
– Hanging in on people’s interests
– Answer people’s questions on Twitter

21. My TopTip for Spring 2013
• Bathrooms, washrooms, toilets are excellent
places for Engagement
• Do you use QR codes?
– Get a campaign putting QR codes on toilet doors

22. Get in Touch!
• Where can you find me?
• Catch me
– Twitter
• @groovegenerator
– LinkedIn
• davidedmundsonbird