Why your social media needs a personality

As most people know by now, social media is a great platform for any sized business that is willing to put in the time and creativity required to keep your fans and customers engaged. Anyone that thinks all they have to do is create a Facebook or Twitter account and people will automatically pay attention either works for Red Bull or has no idea what they are talking about.  

A modified version of the old website adage that "Content is king" applies to social media. You have to constantly be finding RELEVANT content to share with your community. Not just mass quantities of information poured out minute-after-minute via Twitter. That will just overblitz your followers and make them pay less attention to you. One or two really good, relevant posts per day is all it takes. 

One reason why social media is so effective for small businesses is that it allows customers the chance to interact with the brand on a personal basis. The person updating the account is typically the owner and they know their business inside and out. Typically they don't use corporate-speak when talking to customers, they are free to use a sarcastic tone or a cringe worthy dark joke here and there, which the masses appreciate.

That is probably one of the toughest selling points for getting large corporations to use social media. If you put tough restrictions on those that will be updating the account, you will not get a return. But, if you allow your social media people to use their personalities within reason, like Samsung Canada did in this amazing bit of PR work, then you will find success and quite often will get noticed by the community.

So if your social media isn't firing on all cylinders maybe it's time to add a bit more personality into the mix.

Awful Execution

Is there anything worse than a mass communication piece from a company you have a relationship with that forgets your name? As a marketer and someone with half a brain I realize that they don't send out individual emails, but I also understand that my cell phone company should have a system that allows them to put my first name into the email instead of....

They executed the "Dear" part well but that is about as good as they did on this piece in which they were asking their customers for help in making the company better. I have one suggestion for them, but I'm not sure if this email was meant for me because there isn't any name on it so I guess i'll have to save my thoughts.

When you are sending out a mass email or mass communication check your database, check your system, and for goodness sakes do a test run to make sure everything will go smooth. You are sending this out to YOUR clients, I wouldn't want to embarrass myself like this.

Does your marketing smell a little funky?

It might not be a bad thing to have an odor as part of your marketing efforts. Every Tuesday while I am driving home from work my nostrils all of a sudden perk up as I pass a certain point in my route, a KFC restaurant. They've got my attention for those few seconds I smell that delicious KFC odor wafting out from their building. I can only imagine how many people get sucked into ordering a quick bucket of chicken for dinner on their way home instead of making something at home. It's great marketing on their part. Attacking people's noses with a delicious smell at a time when they will be craving food.

So why don't more businesses utilize this type of approach to getting people's attention? Sure there are some odor pollution rules in most major cities but if you are a business that relies on people stopping and entering your location to purchase your product wouldn't smell be a great way to grab their attention.

Retail locations that market smelly products use it in malls all the time - The Body Shop, Lush, etc. But what about the other stores. Just because your company doesn't traditional deal with a smelly product doesn't mean you can't use the sense of smell to draw in prospective customers. If you are a surf shop in Vancouver, why not have a beach odor pouring out of your store? What about a shoe store, get the smell of fresh leather or that new shoe smell trapped and have it wafting from your location. You should be able to grab lots of people's attention as they go buy.

Cook something different up for your marketing plans. It'll be so g-double-o-d good.

Twitter Teetering??

I've written a few posts about Twitter and can personally say that I'm not a huge fan of Twitter. I have used it for my company in the past and to be honest, it did a good job at what we were using it for. But we were using it to help spread political insight leading up to a provincial election as opposed to our day-to-day marketing of health plans. Twitter certainly has its share of success stories including this one that Marketing Magazine shares with us.

That being said, I think Twitter has peaked and is heading for a steady decline. Much like Second Life and a couple of other social networking sites that were big for a while. I read a FastCompany article a few weeks ago saying that 60% of new Twitter users were not logging on again after a month on the site. That's not a good sign. Then just yesterday I read Mitch Joel's post about Twitter and one of the telling quotes from it was this:

At the bare minimum 70% of the people on Twitter won't tell you who they are, where they are located or how to connect to them. That doesn't sound very "social" at all.

On top of that, over half of those people don't follow anyone, have never tweeted and how no followers. So, what's the point? Are most of these "people" not really "people" and simply bots? Or, do the majority of people who sign up for Twitter have no idea what they're getting themselves into, what the point is or how to really use it?

This makes it extremely hard for you to use Twitter as a targeted marketing effort. With 70% of the people not sharing their information your entire list of followers could, in effect, be completely wrong for your business. Take my company for example, we focus largely on British Columbia and sometimes all of Canada. Well anyone that would follow an account of ours in the States or elsewhere on the globe would not be any value to us, nor would we really be providing value to them.

I still don't really see the sustainability of Twitter and don't expect it to have the same buzz about it in the future. However, there clearly is some value for specific companies and individuals but I wouldn't bank my entire marketing efforts on it.

As you can tell, I can relate much more to the brownhaired guy in this video

Tweet Tweet Too Much

When does Twitter become too much?

I am a fairly new user of the much vaunted Twitter and it has made me think about a few things.

Firstly, what happens when every single company you know starts Tweeting? Remember that thing about why advertising is working as well, because everybody gets harassed by 8,000 messages a day or whatever the number was? Well with Twitter you could seemingly receive 8,000 messages in a matter of an hour depending on who you are following. Granted, Twitter offers consumers the power to select who they follow and don't follow but the majority of them probably won't pare down their list once they have added someone.

So what happens when everyone is on Twitter???? I think it will probably lose the a major chunk of its appeal because how do you cut through the clutter of the hundreds of messages you receive to find the good stuff? How do you follow hundreds if not thousands of people?

Twitter is definately still in the beginning stages of its adoption, but it is starting to go like fire. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next year or so and how long of a life it has as a result of its success.

There's always time for email

As late night show host Craig Ferguson says daily "Yes, there's always time for email". Of course he says it with more pizzazz and flashy graphics, but hey when you working with a budget of $0 a title is all you get.

As I found myself preparing a mass email to send out to our prospects today I got wondering, What is the best time to schedule the email to be sent? Research places the best days to send marketing emails as Tuesday and Wednesday but what time of day do you want it to drop. Most would probably think just send it sometime early morning. Here is the issue, with blackberries and other smart phones in the marketplace many people have them rigged to beep when new mail comes in. Do you want to be the company waking up your prospect or client at 4 in the morning because you scheduled an email to go out then? I certainly don't want to be. Thats why I tend to schedule mine to arrive starting at 7am local time. My situation is a little easier because our targets are purely on the west coast, so only one time zone to deal with. But we are starting to push across Canada, and when we do more and more what do I do then? Obviously the easiest option is to segment my list based on provincial location and have a few seperate email lists. What if all I had was a big opt-in email list? Then I think I would probably try to shoot for a 9am delivery on the east coast which would put the mail into my west coast prospects hands at 6am, a reasonable time that is not too early.

I'm not sure if it has even come up that much because I am constantly getting emails from Marketing Associations anywhere from 2 - 5 am. I've had to alter my phone settings so emails come through silently.

Has anyone else run into this problem or thought deeply about their email distribution times?