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How To Create A Social Media Policy For A Small Business

photo credit: breyeschow via photopin cc

We often hear about social media policy but often in the context of big business. No matter what the size your organisation, even if you are a one person business it’s important to have guidelines in place. This will ensure that you have a consistent voice, that everyone including yourself is aware of what and what isn’t appropriate and it enables you to react with a level head if you have to deal with negative customer feedback.

Here’s three types of policy you should consider and how to get started:

Policy 1. For Employees

This is one you might not have thought of but it’s important to let employees know how to refer to you when posting updates to their own social media channels.

Are they allowed to mention you and your company?

Are they allowed to mention the names of work colleagues?

Should they expect to appear in social media updates by the company and by colleagues?

I’m sure you have seen some high profile cases when a staff member has been fired or suspended after posting about their employer on their personal Facebook or Twitter accounts.

There are many good reasons why you should allow your employees to post about you to social media channels. They could be your best brand ambassadors and can help carry your message far beyond the reach of you alone.

If you do allow them to talk about you make it clear what is not acceptable when discussing your company and what penalties will be incurred if they break the rules.

Remember that in order to make sure all your staff really do read your policy you have to make it short, sweet and easy to read.

Policy 2. For Those Updating Your Social Media

Whether it is you, an employee or a number of people updating your social media channels it’s important to have some guidelines in place.

If it’s just for you it can help you stay consistent with your language and tone of voice. It also helps you take the emotion out of your decisions when you need to deal with customer complaints etc. Here are a few points to think about when constructing your policy:

What is your brand personality?

Earlier this year at Social Media World Forum I attended a presentation from Bruce Daisley from Twitter. He introduced us to a simple way to decide on your social brand personality. It’s tempting to always try to be fun on social media but that doesn’t suit every brand. Bruce showed us this triangle and told us to choose two points from it in order to define our tone of voice.

Quite quickly I identified myself and ‘Give Info’ and ‘Help’. Knowing this means that I can ensure that my posts are always consistent. Of course sometimes I am fun but it doesn’t inform the content I create.

If more than one person updates your accounts it also means that you have a consistent voice.

How to deal with complaints

If you have ever had to deal with negative feedback you are probably familiar with the emotions it can bring out in you. It can be hard to keep these off your social media channels, it’s very easy to type something in the heat of the moment and live to regret it. Unfortunately one bad comment from you can mean the situation spirals out of control quite quickly attracting more attention to the complaint.

For this reason, even if you are the only person in the business you must have a set of guidelines that you can refer to in the heat of the moment. Think about your customer service process, will you thank people for their comment? Will you rectify it in public or will you take it offline and if so how? If someone is abusive how will you react?

It’s a good idea to write yourself a list of things that could go wrong and decide in each situation how will react. It’s not a good idea to write it word for word as social media users soon spot cut and paste responses.

When will you delete a post?

It’s important to decide in advance when you will remove a post from your page, how will you identify posts that need to be removed, will it be due to bad language, abuse or something else? You will also need to decide how you will handle complaints from the person whose post you removed and their friends.

How long it will take to get back to customer queries

It’s quite scary to realise, particularly for small businesses, that 42% of social media users expect a response within one hour of posting a query to your social media channels.

You may not be able to respond this quickly if you are on your own and I believe that consumers will give small and micro business a bit more leeway. You need to work out how quickly you are realistically going to respond and set this as a goal, making sure that esquires and comments don’t hang for any longer than that.

3. For the public posting on your pages

This will come from the decisions you make in 1 and 2, the difference is that this is designed to be viewed by the public. You need to include

1. Under what circumstances you will remove posts

2. What sort of language is permissable

3. If it’s acceptable for people to post commercial posts to your pages

You should put this information on your website so you can refer people to it when necessary. If it’s really important to you that people read it in advance of posting you could also add it to your Facebook page as a tab.

These are just starting points for your policy, larger companies will need to get more departments involved, smaller companies may just need to create a basic policy. Whichever applies to you it’s never too soon to think this over and start developing guidelines.

Further reading

Do You Have A Facebook Posting Policy – My post for Tweak Your Biz

5 Must-Haves For Your Brand’s Social Media Policy – From Likeable Media

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6 Ways To Repurpose One Really Great Piece Of Content

Last week I read this fabulous post from Pushing Social that suggested creating a social media content campaign rather than a content calendar. It got me thinking about the different ways that I and others I know repurpose their content to reach different networks and audiences. It all starts with one great piece of content, in most cases a blog post. You should spend a lot of time creating, editing, reviewing and polishing it. Once it’s ready here are six ways you can re-format it in to reach further.

1. The Big Idea.

Great content always starts with a big idea. For the purpose of this blog I’m going to assume that the anchor content, the piece that is going to be at the centre of your activity is a blog post but depending on what you do it could be a speech you are making, a course you are training or a presentation you are giving. It does need to be strong though, you need to think about what insights it really holds and about the different ways that you are going to use it before you start. For example, I fully intend to follow my own advice and use this blog post as an anchor for other content. I need to be aware of the different purposes it’s going to serve whilst writing it.

2.Images & Memes

Now that you have created your anchor blog post you need to think about how it is getting shared. For some networks a link will suffice, others like Pinterest are highly visual so you need to think about whether your images have impact. Do your images work in their own rite? Do they serve a purpose when they are shared alone without the accompanying blog post?

I love what they have done with this recent post over on the Sage Ireland blog. The article is ‘Seven marketing Tips For Small Business‘, they have taken key quotes from the blog and created images from them. One of these was then shared over on their Facebook page and attracted a number of comments, likes and shares. These images work independently of the original post and as you can see by the Facebook share, create their own value by sparking interaction with the brand.

3. Create A Slideshow

I believe that Slideshare is a much overlooked social network, particularly if you are in the B2B sector. Just before Christmas I wrote a mammoth blog post on 10 Digital trends to look out for in 2013. It was huge and took me a long time to put together. Because of the length of the post I decided to use quirky images to illustrate my points and this is when it struck me that I could make a shorter and more digestible version of the post if I used these images to create a powerpoint slideshow.

If you are creating a blog post, with good examples and images it’s quite simple to turn these into a slideshow. My digital trends presentation has had over 700 views to date. I also link the presentation to my Linkedin profile, enhancing my personal brand as well as that of Spiderworking.com.

4. Create a video

Now that you have created your slideshow it’s one simple step to convert it into a video for YouTube and other online video sharing sites. The more up to date versions of PowerPoint allow you to do this directly from the application. If you aren’t a PowerPoint user or if you are using an older version you can use a video editing tool such as iMovie for the mac or Movie Maker for Windows, both allow you to drop in images and transition between them. Here’s one example I found from Rebecca Livermore.

5. Share quotes on Twitter

We talked about turning quotes into images but grabbing short insights from your blog and Tweeting them can also be effective. I’ve discovered that some of my most RT’d tweets have been snippets from speakers at conferences (see below). People love bitesized wisdom on Twitter and sharing really unique, common sense nuggets of information will always attract RT’s and followers. Bare this in mind when you are writing your blog and attempt to include two or three 140 character snippets for tweeting.

6. Create an Ebook

Ok so creating an ebook relies on more than one great piece of content but you can collect a number of blog posts on the same topic together for an ebook or report. Use this to generate more email leads or as a giveaway to attract more people to your site. Hubspot do this really effectively and share links to it not just via their website but on Facebook and Pinterest too.

Using these ways to repurpose one piece of great content means that the quality of what you are doing goes up, you will spend less time writing or creating a great quantity of work that maybe doesn’t come up to scratch. It gives you a way of reaching more people on different networks by tailoring your content to each individual platform.

I you have a good example of someone who repurposes content well, or if you repurpose your content in a way that I haven’t thought of do share your ideas in the comments.

photo credit: Meanest Indian via photopin cc

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Poor old email marketing has taken a backseat to social networks in recent years but it’s a place it really doesn’t deserve. Email marketing is still hugely effective, can offer direct and measurable return on investment and according to a recent study is the way that 77% of people still want to receive their marketing messages.

The first step towards effective email marketing is building a list. Even if you are not quite ready to start a campaign you should be collecting emails so that when you are ready you have a list of subscribers ready to receive it. But before I share my tips on list building here’s some important considerations.

Get permission

Getting permission from subscribers is essential for effective email marketing. It may be tempting to collect a bunch of business cards at a meeting and then add all the email addresses to your list but it’s also against data protection guidelines in Ireland. Even putting these guidelines aside it’s bad practice to send an email shot to people who didn’t request it, here’s why:

When someone receives your email you want them to be happy, you want them to associate a positive emotion when they think about your brand. I get an email from Mari Smith every week, she shares 5 links that she thinks her subscribers will find valuable and I’m always pleased to get it, she’s a great curator. Sometimes this email also contains information about her latest offer, webinar or course. I’m also pleased to hear about this, Mari’s webinars are well worth attending. Sending an email to someone who didn’t request it can have the opposite effect. I started getting unsolicited emails from a deal site last year. Every day they would hit my inbox and every day I’d delete them. Every time I saw them I’d get annoyed, yes it only took clicking one button to unsubscribe but that still seemed like work to me, I didn’t ask for the email and now I had to put effort into unsubscribing. The result – I would never buy anything from that particular company.

Avoid getting marked as spam – In the example above it would have been much easier for me to hit the spam button than unsubscribe and this is another reason that getting permission is crucial. When someone hits the spam button on your email it doesn’t just recognise the email as spam locally, the email address that it comes from gets a black mark next to it, get enough black marks and you’ll find that email providers will not only block email from that address but from all emails from that domain.

Make it easy to unsubscribe

People unsubscribing from your email list is bad right? Well yes it does seem a bit disheartening when someone chooses to unsubscribe from your list but remember if they have no use for your email, if they don’t want the information you send they are either not a potential customer or they simply don’t want what you are sending them. We can learn from this, a good clean email list full of potential customers is the ideal so if someone isn’t a lead there is no real value in having them there. If we get a lot of unsubcribers from one particular newsletter we should look at the content and see what it is that may have caused them to unsubscribe. What could have put them off? Were you selling too hard? Did the email look spammy? Or has it been so long since they subscribed, or so long since you sent your last mail that they don’t remember why they subscribed?

I recently heard that an airline had sent an email to those who hadn’t opened their emails asking if the recipient still wanted to get the newsletter. This is a fantastic way to reconnect with dormant subscribers and to keep the list clean. It also shows that they care about their customers and potential customers.

Segment your list

Some people may want to hear from you once a month, some may want to get something once a week. Existing customers may want different information to leads, different sorts of customers will want to be treated differently. For this reason you should be thinking about segmenting your list in advance. You can do this by asking what sort of content subscribers want to receive at the sign up stage and you can segment yourself by filtering subscribers in to different categories.

How to get subscribers

Put a subscribe form on your website. If you want to encourage subscribers make sure this is prominent on your website, preferably above the fold.

Great call to action from Razor Social – www.razorsocial.com

Add a call to action to the subscribe form. This can be as simple as telling people what they get in return for subscribing. For me it’s ‘social media hints and tips’, others offer a monthly prize for subscribers or a freebie. On my latest joint project ‘We Teach Social‘ we’re offering a free course to one of our subscribers.

weteachsocial — Offer something in return for the subscribe

A strong call to action always works best so ‘Subscribe to our newsletter for monthly social media hints and tips’ will work better than ‘Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter? We’ll send you monthly social media hints and tips’. Telling rather than asking someone what to do will get better results (in spite of what your Mother might have told you).

As well as adding the subscribe form to your main website it’s worth creating a page on your site dedicated to collecting email subscribers. This gives you the opportunity to tell people a bit more about what they will get, leaves room for more segmentation options and gives you a landing page to share on your social media channels when asking for subscribers.

Consider a pop up. Pop up email subscribe boxes that appear once you have spent some time on a site are annoying to some but they do attract new subscribers. I’m not sure Ireland is ready for these yet but it is worth testing it on some pages to see if your subscriber rate increases without loosing page views on your website.

If you have already embarked on email marketing ask for some testimonials from existing subscribers. Ask them to tell you what they like about your emails and add them to your newsletter subscribe page. This will encourage new subscribers as they will be reassured that it’s worthwhile – that you are delivering what you promise.

If you have already embarked on email marketing include a newsletter archive on your sign up page. Again this will encourage potential subscribers to make the leap as they will see exactly what they are signing up to.

Ask for subscribers on your social media channels. I tweet once a week about my mailing list and always get new subscribers. If you run a Facebook competition make sure that getting email opt in is part of the entry process.

Add a call to action to the bottom of blog posts. You can either add a subscribe form here or link to your subscribe page.

Add a link to your email subscribe page / form to your email signature.

If your business has a physical location – a shop or an office that customers visit – try and capture email addresses there. Ask people to subscribe to be in with the chance of winning something. I know I put my business card in to a bowl at Wagamama a long time ago as part of a contest and I’ve been getting special offers from them ever since. As I am a customer of Wagamama already these offers are always welcome and encourage me to visit more often. If you don’t have a premises take advantage of trade shows and events to encourage subscribers in a similar manner.

wagamama email offer — Email offers from Wagamama encourage me to visit more often

If you run an online store it’s easier to capture email addresses. Ensure that you are asking for the subscribe opt in as part of the check out process.

When you send emails out ask people to tell their friends, give them a link to your subscribe page that they can share with others.

What have I left out? What tips do you have for getting new email subscribers?

If you are based in or close to Kildare book a spot on my email marketing for beginners workshop in Naas on 3rd & 4th December. You will learn more about how to best utilise email marketing for your business and create an email to send to your customers in time for Christmas. Call 045 897610 to book your place for just €40. Find out more about what is included in the workshop here.

photo credit: Ed Siasoco (aka SC Fiasco) via photopin cc

Day one at the Dublin Web Summit was packed full of amazing speakers and insights. This is the first of many blog posts exploring the themes addressed by the speakers that I will be sharing over the next few days. I’ve also been lucky enough to get some video interviews with some of the speakers so keep an eye out for those both here and on my YouTube channel.

Joshua March from Conversocial – Social Media & Customer Service

Joshua’s presentation addressed the customer service challenges we face in social media. Here’s what I picked up from his speech:

Like it or not customer service is changing, in many ways this is good for business small and large. Enabling customer service through social media can be a massive asset.

When brands first embraced social media they tended to see it as a marketing tool, a way to push their message out. At the same time customers were finding that social media was a new way to get the attention and communicate with brands. At first customers would use it as the last resort, when traditional channels didn’t work. They felt, and in my mind still do feel that by asking a company to address their complaints or queries publicly they are asking them to account for their actions. Now for the younger generation particularly using social media to contact companies for customer service queries has become the norm.

As at first it was the marketing departments running social media for businesses and it soon became apparent that they weren’t armed with the tools to deal with customer service, they would ignore some complaints or deal with them badly. Now companies are learning from their mistakes. Dealing with customer service via social media has many advantages.

- It’s cost effective – customer service issues dealt with via social media are much less costly than those dealt with via phone.

- It’s an opportunity – now when companies resolve an issue they not only delight their customers but they do so publicly.

Joshua pointed to the Odeon Cinema chain as an example

Odeon had had a hard time on social media, particularly Facebook a quick google will show you what happened. However they learnt from this, they had learnt the hard way that social was not just a marketing channel and their response was to enable real customer service agents to respond to customers via social media. They gave them training and rebuilt the way they were doing customer service.

How should small business approach social media customer service?

After Joshua’s presentation I started to consider how small business should approach customer service. Here are some of my conclusions:

As small businesses it’s important that we work customer service into our social media plans. There are three key points we should consider.

1. What is customer service to us?

It’s common to imagine customer service just refers to dealing with complaints in a social media context. However customer service should be more than that, it should be a key consideration in our social media planning. We not only need to decided how to deal with a complaint but we need to know what sort of queries we can expect, will customers turn to our social media channels to find out more about our product and service? If we collate our most common queries or even anticipate them we can create content in the form of blog posts or video tutorials that will address them.

This is valuable in two ways. Firstly we don’t have to keep repeating ourselves, we have a resource that can address common queries. Secondly if we host this content on our websites we should see a SEO advantage, if customers are asking these questions of us they must be asking the same questions of the Internet, by addressing them we can attract new customers via the web.

2. Joshua spoke of delighting our customers but how can we do this?

Take some time to think about what you would do in different situations. How will you deal with a customer complaint that would not only resolve the issue but resolve it in such a way that the customer is willing to shout about the quality of the response they got? How can you delight your customers on a day to day basis? This is harder but you need to make sure you are providing something unique and tailored in order to make your customers feel valued. This can be as simple as knowing their names, not using automated content to respond to customers & being personal.

3. When have you experienced great customer experience?
Think aobut the times people have been so happy with customer service they have told you about it, about the times you have been so happy with customer service you have told others. Let these experiences inspire you, what can you do to replicate these experiences?

Do you agree? Have you found a magic formula to delight your customers or have you just been on the receiving end of great online customer service. Tell me your stories below.

**UPDATE** – Find the full presentation from Joshua March here.

We usually associate the term ‘curation’ with museums and galleries. The curator is the person who researches, sources, archives and interprets content for exhibitions. Digital content curation is similar. As social media account holders we curate content all the time, every time we share a link on Twitter or Facebook we are in a sense curating. Done well curation can be a hugely effective part of your social media campaign, it can enhance your brand, it can help establish your expertise, it builds relationships and it helps keep you informed about your industry and customer. It’s a massive time saver, sharing great content from others is far less time consuming that creating it all yourself. Having said that content curation shouldn’t replace creation but should complement it.

You’re probably aware of more content curation than you realise. As I mentioned above the sharing of links, images, photos etc on Twitter or Facebook is curating. Networks like Pinterest are almost exclusively content curation centres. Repinning and pinning from websites is far more prevalent than the uploading of unique images. Some Tumblr’s are excellent examples of curation. The most talked about at the moment being ‘Rich Kids Of Instagram‘. The site simply shares Instagram shots of wealthy youngsters enjoying their privileged lifestyle

As curators we are presented with a problem. There is so much content out there, how do we find the right content and how do we filter it so that we are only sharing the very best content that is relevant to our target market?

Finding content

Here are three of my favourite content discovery tools

1. Google Alerts – This is a powerful tool from Google that scours the Internet and returns results based on a search term. It sends the results via email or you can choose to subscribe to them in Google Reader. I recommend Google Reader as alerts emails can soon start to clog up your inbox. For tutorials on how to set up Google Alerts and Reader click here.

Once you have been using Google Alerts for a while you will soon begin to recognise some key publications that consistently produce good content. You should subscribe to the feeds of these blogs in your Google reader also.

2. Technorati - Technorati is a fantastic site full of blogs on every topic imaginable. It’s a good start for finding blogs to subscribe to. If you find a good one see if they have a blogroll, this will lead you to other gems.

3. Google+ – For me the strongest part of Google+ from a user perspective is the ability to discover content. Use the search bar to find topics and it will return search results both from the web and Google+ users. Not only will you find new content but you’ll also find people with similar interests to connect with.

There are plenty of other services that can help you find great stuff but these three are my top picks. If you’ve any recommendations do leave me a link in the comments section.

Examples of curation

Laughing Squid are a cloud hosting company but their blog is quirky and always full of fantastic and amazing content. When you visit the sight there is a call to action on the right hand side asking you to support the site by hosting your WordPress blog on their Cloud hosting. Targeting WordPress users with this sort of content seems a good fit. They are one of my favourite Twitter and G+ follows.

Sony Electronics on Pinterest share a variety of their own content and the content of others. This board shares self portraits taken by Sony users featuring the camera, they have gathered together content from all over the place.

Wchingya on Twitter, Ching curates a huge amount of links every day, there’s some great stuff there, I for one am envious and wonder where she finds it all!

I’m loving the ‘Awkward Stock Photos‘ on Tumblr. Not a commercial enterprise but it will make you smile as you scroll through some of the most bizarre stock photos around.

Did you spot my bit of content curation? Of course by sharing those links I’m curating the curators. The four examples above are hardcore curators, as a small business owner you should be looking to mix up great curated content that is of interest to your customers and your own content, and don’t forget the conversation!

If you would like Spiderworking.com to help you put together a social media strategy give us a call.

You must be familiar with the orange RSS feed logo that appears on blogs and websites. RSS feeds are a wonderful way for users to keep up to date with your latest blog posts, for you to keep up to date with your favourite blogs and when added to tools such as Hootsuite or Twitterfeed they will auto-update your social networks each time you add new content.

More on RSS feeds – what they are and how to use them here

For me RSS feeds are an essential part of my social media schedule. I subscribe to my favourite blogs and scour Google Reader (a tool that brings all my feeds into one place) every morning for stories that interest me and may interest my readers. Using feeds this way for content discovery is also something I teach as part of any social media strategy. I would be lost without them.

I was surprised to hear this week that the latest Apple OS update (Lion) had removed RSS from both the Safari browser and it’s Mail application. I was also dismayed to hear that someone had been given the advice to not display their RSS feed prominently on their blog. The reason being that people would be forced to visit your site to consume their content rather than reading it off site.

This seems like bad logic to me. If you write a blog and I stumble on it, and if I find your content interesting I’m likely to want to subscribe. There’s nothing worse that searching the site looking for the feed link, sometimes I give up, sometimes I try adding /feed after the web address to see if I can identify it this way. If you make it easy for me to subscribe you can be sure I’ll be visiting your website again.

In your blog settings you can choose how your content is displayed on RSS readers. Compact shows you just the first paragraph of text, it gives you a taster of what is to come but forces you to click through to the main website to read more. You can also display the full text of your blog, readers can then consume the entire post on their reader app. Both of these have advantages and disadvantages.

Compact

Advantage - People have to visit your website to read on, once there you can entice them to buy, read more, get in touch.

Disadvantage – if your first few lines aren’t compelling enough your reader may not click through. I know that I have to be really impressed by an opening to be encouraged to open another tab on my browser to read your stuff.

Full text

Advantage – Readers can skim or read your entire post without leaving their RSS reader app, this offers a better user experience.

Disadvantage – If the full text is available readers have no reason to click through to your site. If distributing the full text via RSS be sure to include a strong call to action either in the text or as a footnote.

Is your RSS feed easy to find on your Blog? Is it something you’d like to promote more? Leave your comments below.

One of the biggest criticisms of social media is that people are abandoning ‘real people’ to spend their time online. I see it differently, social media is a great way of meeting new people, forging new relationships and it’s a way of always having a ‘real person’ to hook up with wherever in the world you find yourself.

I’m in Scotland at the moment, my parents live in a pretty remote village on the east coast not far from John O’Groats. On my way here I met up with a friend in Edinburgh, a friend I met online through a mutual friend on Facebook. We had breakfast before I had to catch the train. There used to be a fellow tweeter who lived just up the road from my parents and we were able to meet for a pint and a chat when I visited. Last week in Dublin I went to a TweetUp with the host and listeners of the FIR podcast. It was great to meet new people with similar interests and to chat with some people I hadn’t seen in a while.

These are all real people and they are all people I’ve met online. They’re not strangers, they are people I know I have something in common with and as we’ve chatted online it’s easy enough to bring that conversation into the real world.

How does this translate to business? One of the things I love most about social media is that is able to take the coldness out of cold calling and the fear out of networking meetings. Here’s a few tips on building these relationships.

Linkedin Events

Linkedin is a great place to find out about networking events happening near you. Once you’ve decided which ones to go to check out the guest list and see who you might have a synergy with, who you may have met online before. Remember this isn’t people you want to sell to directly. These are people you can build strong connections with, people that you may be able to refer business to in the future or who may be able to refer business to you. If there is someone you are keen to meet drop them a message or an email before the event and arrange to meet them. It’s great to walk into a room at an event and know you have someone to meet.

Linkedin Connections

I’m quite strict about who I connect to on Linkedin. It might be old fashioned but I still use it as a trusted network. I tend to only connect to people who I’ve met and had a chat with or had a prolonged discussion with online. Of course all rules are there to be broken and if I haven’t met someone personally I sometimes offer to meet for coffee so we can get to know each other better. I’ve met some great people this way, people I can refer business to and people I can just ask a question of if I need help as well as people who might need to ask me for help from time to time.

Building relationships with Twitter

Twitter is a great relationship building tool. You can attempt to get to know anyone you want to on Twitter. Getting into conversations with people, chatting about topics you have in common mean that you can really get to know people. It’s simple to take this one step further and suggest meeting for coffee, a milkshake or lunch. As someone who lives down the country I find this particularly useful during my trips to Dublin and it’s how I found myself having a great chat over breakfast in Edinburgh yesterday.

Going To Events with Twitter

I travel to conferences quite often, most of the time alone. Following the Twitter #tag means that I’m never stuck for someone to talk to in a lunch or coffee break. Recently in London I got to meet to Irish Tweeters, @paulinesargent and @jilloherlihy. You might think it odd that I travelled all the way to London to meet to Irish people but it was a great opportunity to get to know them better and hopefully forge stronger relationships in the future.

I’m really only scratching the surface with this blog post and I’d really like to hear your stories of real people you’ve met offline. Leave your stories and suggestions below in the comments.

A bottle of Champagne arrived in the post for me recently. I was delighted, it was unexpected and of course Champagne just makes you feel happy. Here’s how and why it happened and how being delightful could benefit your company.

Last month, as regular readers might know, I attended Social Media World Forum in London. I will always Tweet at a conference like this, firstly I know there is information on the day that I will want to share with my followers because it is useful, secondly I get to meet people at the event itself. I am always aware however that I might be flooding the Twitter stream with my tweets so try and hold back, only sharing the very best information. The event was great, I met lots of new people both in person and on Twitter and I learnt loads too.

A few days after my return I got a Tweet from one of the event sponsors Synthesio saying that as I’d Tweeted so much they were going to send me some Champagne, could I DM my address. I was sure once they found out I was based in Ireland they would change their mind but a week or so later the Champagne arrived in the post along with a really handy little book ’The Quick Start Guide To Social Media Monitoring’ (pictured above).

Surprising people like this is a great way to build brand ambassadors, you can be sure every time I see the Synthesio logo now I’m going to remember the champagne and how nice it was to get such a surprise. I’ve even looked into what the company do, at the conference I was aware of their branding but didn’t look any closer. Now I know the next time a client is looking for paid brand monitoring their name will make it onto my recommended list.

How can you be delightful?

So how can you be delightful? Take a look at the most engaged users on your social media channels, why not treat them to something? Don’t make it a competition, don’t even announce it in advance, surprise them and reward them for their loyalty. A discount voucher isn’t enough, it should be something tangible. If you sell a product you could send them a sample and ask for their feedback, if it’s a service can you offer them a short consultation for free. If you want to be really delightful why not research your influencers a bit further. You can find out quite a lot from a Facebook profile or by reading a few tweets. Try to discover what they’re in to and reward them with something that matches those interests. If they are a reader buy them a book from the genre they are interested in, if they are a wine lover find a great bottle that they will love, if they are a foodie an artisan food product would go down a storm.

The result will be a very happy person who will have an even stronger connection to your brand and will talk about you even more pushing your brand awareness and encouraging more referrals.

Have you ever delighted your customers? Have you ever been delighted by a spontaneous gift from a comapny? I’d love to hear your stories.

If you’ve been using social media for business for some time you will start to recognise specific people who contribute to your posts, discussions & tweets the most. They start to become the core of your community and will recommend you, your pages and your services to others they know. These are your ‘Brand Advocates’. This is a hugely powerful group of people and gathering a strong group is essential for increasing the reach of your message. How can you nurture these people? How can you encourage them to share more? Here are four recent examples of businesses using user generated curation or content to engage with and create new advocates.

@Ireland Twitter Account

WorldIrish.com launched a very clever initiative giving people the opportunity to curate the @Ireland Twitter account for a week. It’s totally up to the curator to decide what to post. As I’m typing this the current curator is Jonathan Lynn whose day job involves curating and promoting street art. As you can imagine there has been much talk about street art on the page this week.

The aim of the project according to the World Irish Website is:

…@Ireland is based around the idea that a single voice cannot represent a country. By sharing peoples’ experiences and lives with the world, project curators WorldIrish believe @Ireland can help to further connect Ireland to the world and the world to Ireland.

You can view the tweets from previous curator on the WorldIrish website. I have my hand hovering over the send button on an email applying to be a curator… I’ll keep you informed if I do decide to go for it.

ProBlogger

Another country, this time using user generated content to promote itself is Australia but this time it’s being pushed out by ProBlogger. I love the story behind this one. Darren Rowse, from ProBlogger decided that there were very few products he’d be happy to promote via his extensive social media channels and blog. One of those oh his list was his home, Austrailia. With this promotion he’s managing to fulfil that wish. I first saw it pop up on Google+.

The competition will bring 10 bloggers on an all expenses paid trip to The Great Barrier reef. In return the winners will be expected to blog about their experiences. Sadly the deadline for entries on this one has passed. Those that did enter had to submit their ideas on how they would approach the task as well as submitting links to their own blogs and social media sites. It’s clear they won’t just be selecting the winners on audience size but also on their ideas and how the experience will relate specifically to their readers.

The rules of entry will ensure that they get the best 10 bloggers with the biggest influence to participate in the project. By throwing the net wide and by running it as a competition rather than just researching influential bloggers in the field ProBlogger has already created a buzz around the project, many readers, myself included will be following the stories of the winners avidly.

Irish Rail Blogger

It’s fantastic to see Ireland in the European Soccer finals this year. I doubt many of the people planning to attend have looked further than an aeroplane for getting there, however you can get there by train and Irish rail have come up with an excellent way to promote this service by engaging bloggers and potential bloggers.

The winner will travel over-ground via InterRail , get accommodation on a fan campsite in Ponza, have tickets to the three group games and receive €1,000 spending money. A great budget holiday that is bound to attract the student and the all important Millenial generation. Winners will be expected to produce daily blog posts in return.

To be in with a chance of winning applicants are asked to submit a sample blog post covering a journey they’ve taken or a sporting event they’ve attended.

The good news is that there is still time to enter this one, the deadline is Friday 27^th April at 5pm. Details here.

Getting to the Euro’s is going to be a big stretch for a lot of people this year and the news has been full of the huge prices of flights and hotel accommodation. This competition should draw attention to the budget options that I’m sure will attract many of the people who otherwise could not have attended.

A-Wear

Engaging your audience this way and encouraging brand advocates is not a new thing. Clothing chain store A-Wear have always been very smart at bringing their audience on board and as I started to read about the ProBlogger and Irish Rail blogging competitions I was reminded of a promotion from A-Wear and the Electric Picnic a couple of years ago. They recruited bloggers via their Facebook page, narrowed it down to a few finalists, styled them in A-Wear clothes and asked their community to vote on a winner.

This competition was hugely engaging to watch on social media, appealed exactly to their target market and although it only produced one blog entry as far as I can work out, it definitely created a buzz around the brand as well as sending customers into the store to pick up their gear for the festival.

Have you seen any clever ways that brands have engaged their communities?

As you may have noticed I’ve been looking forward to seeing Chris Brogan speak at Social Media World Forum for quite some time. When I arrived I sat (almost) right at the front so that I wouldn’t miss a word (see stalker style picture above). Here’s what I learnt.

Define your business goal

I guess people may be getting tired of hearing me banging on about Facebook Likes not being important, and it is true, you do need Likes in order to reach people, if you’re finding it hard to gather them here’s some of my tips. However the number of Likes or followers you have, or your Klout score should never be the goal of your social media campaign. Chris started his talk by revealling a conversation he overheard between two business people at breakfast. ‘Not once did they mention their Klout score or their Facebook Likes… social tools should be used in the service of doing business the same way that a telephone is.’ Apparently a bank manager won’t take your Klout score or Facebook Likes as payment for your mortage either! Using social media needs to be about achieving a measurable goal. This was the theme of Chris’s talk.

Your Website

Does your website have a strong call to action? When someone arrives there is it clear what they have to do next? or are there multiple calls to action? If it’s the latter the site is badly designed. You always need to be thinking about the sales process and guide visitors through it. In the age of mobile you need to make sure your site looks great on all devices, from a small screen phone to an iPad. It’s worth the investment as more and more consumers are accessing the web this way.

Your Email Marketing

91% of consumers over the age of 18 said they would prefer to interact with a brand via email. This is hugely more than any social media channel, email is not as you may of heard dead, it’s alive and well… bad email marketing is dead. Having a beautiful HTML designed email that fits in with your website is not what is important. Segmenting and segregating your email list so that you are sending the right message is. Make sure you are targetting customers, leads etc differently.

If you are putting more than one call to action in your newsletter then you are diluting your message make sure your emails don’t run to longer than 350 words. If it’s too long for you to read on a mobile device it’s also too long for the people you are sending it to. Encourage engagment and interaction by ensuring when someone clicks the reply button the email comes straight to you your email newsletter should be a ‘relationship experience’.

Video

Create interesting searchable content on YouTube. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, it’s important to embrace it. Again it’s not about views it’s about leads and conversions so define your goal, decide who you are trying to reach with your video and what information they will be searching for. Think about how you will turn them from leads into conversions.

Finding time for social media

‘I don’t have the time’ is a common complaint from social media sceptics so we need to look at where we do spend our time. At the moment how do we generate leads? Something like cold calling can reach up to 12 people an hour where as spending an hour on social media has the potential to reach 1,000.

These are the key points I picked up from Chris’s presentation, they may seem a little disjointed but there were so many in his talk I found it hard to keep up. At the end I asked him for examples of small business using Google+ well and I’ll be coming back to you on these. Were you at the talk? What tips have I missed? Remind me by posting them in the comments section below.

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