Marketing Tips and News

Have you thought about using social media to get leads and find potential customers? You should. Social media is the new word of mouth marketing and listening to it will help you find new audiences. The #8 conversation you should be listening for through your social media engagement is The Question/Inquiry.

If you provide health, medical and care services to help elderly adults stay in their home, listening to the questions people are asking about your industry can provide an opportunity to position yourself as an expert on the subject and help attract clients.

When people post a question using social media, they are doing so in the moment when they are looking for a solution. Listen, respond quickly, be a resource. The time you invest in this new form of word-of-mouth marketing is time well spent because you are speaking directly to someone who needs your services. It’s targeted, personal and impactful.

A public complaint can be useful, even though it seems embarrassing.

Social media. It seems like that’s all anyone is talking about lately, and for good reason. Social media is the new word of mouth. We all know how important word of mouth or person-to-person marketing is to businesses and organizations. If you’re not using social media to engage your clients, customers, donors and constituents, it’s like not picking up the phone when they call.

At Write Result, we know which conversations you should be listening for through social media and how and when to engage your audience.  We’ll identify some of the top 10 conversations to listen for on our blog in the coming weeks. Let’s start with conversation #10 – The Complaint.

Complaining about a company, product or service was one of the most common initial experiences of social media.  But why should someone’s complaint on a blog post, a twitter feed or their Facebook page about your organization be looked at any differently than a complaint letter sent to your customer service center? The public nature of social media makes it different.

Receiving a complaint from a client or customer is not a new experience for businesses and organizations. But responding to a complaint in social media requires a much more immediate action.

The culture of social media is one that values transparency, immediacy and validation. While you may not be able to solve the problem right away, just letting the complainer know that you are listening and that you want to do something about it right away can make a significant difference.  You might be surprised at the positive reaction you will get just by letting people know that you’re listening, that you took the time to notice and reach out. Timeliness is key in social media. And timeliness is also one of the benefits of engaging your audiences through social media.

So don’t be afraid of complaints delivered through social media. Realize the opportunity you have to quickly and efficiently turn a negative into a positive and showcase your organization’s customer relations skills in a public way. This type of engagement will engender trust and loyalty, the ultimate return on investment!

Sure, it would be nice to have a service like Vocus or Cision.

It would take care of or automate a lot of the drudge work of PR, such as tracking down media contacts for your campaigns and keeping track of results. But it’s not cheap!

The least expensive option a company like Vocus can offer — without many of the bells and whistles that make it so attractive in the first place — is about $4,000 a year. Since we deal mostly in locally oriented companies and our clients are deeply rooted in the communities of Volusia and Flagler counties, it’s easy to see that the national media contacts one of these big services can provide  would not be a good value for them.

We are always looking for ways to give our clients a lot of bang for their buck, and that includes doing as much as we can for free. Of course, it takes some digital elbow grease on our part. But, if we need to, we can use traditional methods, plus social media and other means to pitch for attention on a national level. Here are two free services that can be useful:

• pr.com: Experts say this is one of the few free news release sites worth the bother, but it can be tricky to keep from racking up a bill here. The “free” news release distribution is bare bones — no google or Yahoo news, no links, no embedded images or videos — but it does do pretty well in straight-up search engines and will be seen by a good number of people. I recommend the video above to see how it works. (If you can’t see it, it’s at http://www.youtube.com/v/w9DW2vbCiXE)
• pitchengine.com: I just learned about this from a Vocus Webinar — many are free and I recommend you check out the Vocus link that opened this post for a list — and it offers a lot for zero investment. In your pitch, you can include videos, audio, images and social links. Pitchengine shares your release with “your media contacts via link or email or with thousands of consumers via social sites like Facebook, Twitter and others.”