How Mobile and Social Drives Sales

Here is a link to a presentation that I made on 22nd March at the Figaro Digital conference on Mobile Marketing. The presentation was entitled “Multi-channel Retail Challenges” and was about the challenges that retailers face when combining sales channels. In particular the role that mobile devices and social channels play in driving both online and offline sales.

http://www.figarodigital.co.uk/Video.aspx?v=73c5c876-5069-4694-b2cb-ff23a9195786

Facebook Group or Facebook Page

In most cases a business or organisation will setup a Facebook page. However there are occasions when setting up a group instead, or as well, makes sense.

• Groups are intended to be used by people who share a common interest; for example, the members of a Sunday League football club, a group of rock climbers or people who work at a particular branch of a bank
• Pages are intended to be used by organisations or entities which people may follow; for example, a Premier League football club or an indoor climbing wall or a bank

The key differences are as follows:

• Messages sent from page show up on the users’ homepage and in their Facebook Inbox
• A page has a higher visibility on the user’s profile
• Every tab in your page is searchable and visible. Since you can have more tabs in a page than in a group you can create more searchable information
• Page administrators are anonymous. Updates they make or messages they send come from the page not the person.
• There is no limit to the applications you can have on a page – this gives you much more flexibility
• You can integrate social media applications and blog posts with pages
• Pages can have reviews
• You can setup discussion forums rather than just walls

Groups make sense for organisations if you want to create a community amongst some or all of your users. Good examples are user delivered advice or support, customer meet-ups, or specific products that you want to focus on.

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How to setup a Facebook Page

Organisations can setup pages in order to communicate with their target audience.

Pages are free to setup but do require time and commitment to maintain them.

To start visit www.facebook.com/pages/create.php (you will need to be logged in to create a page) and fill in he information under the “Official Page” section.

Under the section entitled “Create a page for a:” you’ll need to choose the most appropriate category.

If your business is entirely local, select ‘Local business’ as this will make it easier for your pages to be found in searches for local businesses. Otherwise, select ‘Brand, product or organisation’.

Once you’ve clicked on the ‘Create official Page’ button you’ll be taken to the “Get Started” tab for your new page.

The page has a numbered list of things to do. Ignore the sequence shown or you’ll end up telling people about the page before you are ready. As you work through this page the list gets shorter until finally this tab disappears.

Your first task is to upload your company logo or a product picture by clicking on “upload an Image”. This can be up to 4Mb in size.

The next task is to enter some information about the product or your company. Click the ‘Edit page’ button under “Provide some basic information”. Fill in as much information as you want here. This will appear in the “Info” tab of your page.

Click on the ‘Post update’ button to get some information on your Page Wall for visitors to look at. This will allow you to make your first status update:

Finally you should import contacts; this can be done by uploading a contact list or by giving Facebook temporary access to your email account(s). As ever, be sure to only allow the invitation to be sent to people you are sure won’t object to receiving it.

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Getting ready to Twitter

Obviously, before you can start to Twitter you’ll need to signup for the service. If you have already signed-up you may want to go back in and update/modify your profile.

Signing-up is a simple process. Visit http://www.twitter.com and click the “Join the conversation!”button. That will link you to a page titled “Create a free Twitter account”.

On this page you select your username and password. Be aware that the username is your Twitter Handle and it will appear next to your Tweets on other peoples Twitter feeds.

Company or Personal Handle?

When you create a Twitter account you need to decide if it is to be a company or personal one.

1. If you are creating a company account to be used for corporate communications then you’ll want to use the company name; e.g. ACME. That’ll make it easier for your organisation to be found on Twitter.
2. If you are creating one for yourself or other people in your company to use as a business account, or you may want to consider combining your organisations name and their name; e.g. ACMEJaneRoberts. This can make it easier for people to find your colleagues on Twitter.
3. If you work alone under your own name you may want to use your name as your Handle. Bear in mind that if your company grows you may want to change your Handle, so it may be easier to start as you mean to go on.

Choosing Handles

Given the scale of Twitter, your name or your company name may already have been taken by people or organisations that you share it with. If you find they have been you’ll need to find someway of creating a unique Handle.

• Try a variation – shortening, initials or common abbreviations or a combination; e.g. JRoberts or JaneR
• Try adding your industry or occupation; e.g. JaneRobertsVet – or combining with the above; e.g. JaneRVet
• Try adding your niche or a unique feature from your service or product; e.g. JaneRHorseVet or if you are a local business your region; e.g. JaneRSurreyVet
• It used to be the case that using an underscore e.g. Jane_Roberts, would be avoided as being out of the norm, but as it becomes harder to create unique Handles it’s becoming more accepted.

Avoid using, if at all possible:

• Random names or nicknames as they have no association with your business
• Combining your name and numbers e.g. JaneRoberts123 as it just looks like you haven’t put in enough thought

If you are setting up a company Handle, keep a careful note of the password and setup an email address such as twitter@acme.com

If you are creating personal Handles for company use again keep a careful note of the password and fill in the users work email address. This allows you to change the password if that person leaves the company.

Checking your Email Contacts

Once you have completed the rest of the signup form and clicked on “Create my account” you’ll be asked if you want to check if any of your current email contacts use Twitter.

If you use GMail (GoogleMail), Hotmail or YahooMail this can be a good way of finding people to follow.

If you don’t want to do this just press skip. If you do want to do this you’ll also get a message asking if you want to invite all of your contacts to Twitter.

Think carefully before doing this as it will send an email to all these people. If you decide not to just press skip.

Make your Profile your own

Once you have completed the signup you’ll need to personalise your profile page. This stage is important as:

• Most spammers don’t personalise their profile. Personalising yours adds a little credibility
• People check your profile before deciding to follow you. The more information you have the greater the likelihood that will happen

On the menu at the top right of the page, click settings. This will open your profile page with the account tab active. We’ll ignore the account settings for now. Click on the profile tab.

Picture: People like to see the human side of an organisation so you should upload a photograph of yourself or the user. As you have up to 700k there is no excuse for some awful mobile phone head and shoulders snapshot. Try to use a photograph that represents the way you want to be seen. If you are creating a corporate profile; upload your logo.

Name: Fill in your real name; e.g. Jane Roberts, since this is what you use when doing business. If you are setting up personal handles for company use, enter the users real name.

Location: Use this to connect with people in your locale. Use the convention for postal addresses in your country. E.g. in the UK it would be Woking, Surrey, United Kingdom while in the US it might be Seattle, WA, United States of America. The more local your business the more address information you would put in.

Web: The address of your website, your blog or your LinkedIn profile. Any online resource where people can find out more about you. If you are creating a personal profile for company use, you will need a ‘no change’ policy here.

One Line Bio: This is space for a max 160-character elevator pitch. This is your chance to persuade people to follow you, so spend time crafting it. Focus on your unique defining competence.

Click the ‘Save’ button then click the ‘Account’ button

Name: This automatically comes across from your profile settings.

Username: This is your handle automatically filled in. Below this you will see what your Twitter URL is. You can change it here if you wish but be aware of all the promotional items out there with your Twitter ID or URL on them.

Email: Again automatically filled in. You can change this if you wish (it’s used to retrieve forgotten password or Handles). If you are creating personal accounts for company use you should forbid changes. Check the “Let others find me by my email address” as this will help people to search for your Twitter Handle.

Time Zone: Select your time-zone from the dropdown. This helps ensure that Tweets are shown in the right order on the recipients device and so maintains the flow of conversations.

Tweet Location: If you wish you can set the location from which you have sent the Tweet. This may be useful if you are at an event such as an exhibition, seminar or show.

Tweet Media: This determines what you see not what you Tweet. Whether you check this or not has no marketing relevance.

Tweet Privacy: Leave the “Protect my Tweets” box unchecked. Checking it slows down how quickly your network grows as it prevents people from finding you via the Twitter service. If you really need to restrict who can see your Tweets, set up a seperate non-marketing Twitter handle.

Design it

Lastly go to the design tab. Here you can add change the theme and background to your Twitter page and modify your colours to represent your brand colours. This will control what visitors to your Twitter page see.

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Be careful who you sell to, be careful who you buy from

I received an email today from a site that I am subscribed to. It was a promotion from a company who has paid for that site to send a promo email to their subscribers.

That’s fine. I understand that the site I am subscribed to is entitled to make money.

But the service they are promoting is, as far as I am concerned, providing spam data.

And even worse, if I click the button in the email, my email address is revealed to the spammer.

It is a company that gets data by trawling the web for names, phone numbers, addresses and emails. Then sells it as a mailing list.

I know it’s spam because I am on it and I have never given them my data. I know its spam because the info they hold on me is 30-months out of date. I know it’s spam because I have never consented to them having my data.

That disappoints me. It lessens the esteem I have for the website I am subscribed to. It devalues their brand.

Moral. If you are allowing a piggyback campaign check out the company you are allowing to piggyback. Limit strictly what they are allowed to do. And even if the offer is via a trusted provider; check before you buy.

P.s. The offer is from Zoominfo – don’t touch it with a bargepole.

Setting up your Facebook personal profile

1 – Sign Up. Go to www.facebook.com and click fill in the details in the boxes underneath the words “sign up” then click the ‘Sign Up’ button.

2 – Edit your profile. On the home page you’ll see a placeholder picture of you. Click on “Edit My Profile” next to this.

Bear in mind that you can control who sees what on your Facebook profile. Read the post on privacy settings for more information.

This will take you to the Basic Info page where you can add information as you wish. As with all the pages in your profile the information is optional. Remember that the information you enter here is personal information (the work info will come when you setup a Page").

3 – Update your Information. Work down the menu on the left of the page.

You’ll definitely want to upload a profile picture as people want to see who they are communicating with.

It’s also worth adding information into the education and works page; this helps with networking and to the Likes and Information page.

Finally you’ll want to add your contact details.

4 – Join networks. If you have valid email addresses for university or college (alumni associations) or workplaces, the next step is to join some networks. Click on the arrow next to the “Account” menu option on the top right of the page and then select “Account Settings”.

On the following page select the “Network” tab. Then fill in the Network Name. The remaining boxes will change depending on the type of network you are joining.

5 – Find Friends. Communication within Facebook is based on Friendships. So you’ll need to find people you know that you can connect with.

Click “Home” on the top right menu, then click “Friends” underneath your picture.

This takes you to a page where you can use a number of tools to find people who are already on Facebook.

The first seven options allow you to use search your email or your instant messaging account to see if any of the addresses you have emailed are registered in profiles on Facebook. The last option allows you to import a contact list.

If you do get hits, you will be prompted to send Friend requests to these people; you can of course deselect the ones you do not want to send to. Facebook will also offer to invite people you email who are not found to join Facebook.

As always, be very careful who you send these requests to; they should be people with whom you genuinely have a relationship.

Since ‘friending’ is a mutual process – they have to accept your request – it may take some time for people to start appearing in your Friends list.

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Where to find material to Tweet

The content that you tweet will depend on the effect that you want the tweet to have.

That effect can either be to do something or to remember you.

Whichever you want the customer to do, your tweet must be (as I explained a couple of weeks ago) compelling.

The secret is to put yourself in the customers shoes. Ask yourself; “if I were the customer, will I see value when I read this?”

You can create compelling content from:

• Something that captures your attention that your audience will also find captivating.
• Something you have in common to which you can bring advice or insight.
• A relevant hot-topic from their industry, market, customers or the wider economy.
• One or two sentence thought provokers. “Have you blogged a series of posts that could make an eBook? All you need is DTP software and Adobe Acrobat to revive old content.”
• Events from your promotional calendar. Or even other peoples events that are relevant.
• Re-tweet messages that you receive that are worth passing on.
• Links to your opinion pieces, white papers, podcasts, webinars etc.
• Interesting online articles, book reviews and other peoples blogs
• Questions. Ask them to get feedback or content for your next blog post.

Just remember to focus on intrinsic value for the recipient.

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Making the most of LinkedIn

I’ve taken all of my posts on using LinkedIn and put them into an article that you can download from my Google Docs account.

Feel free to pass it on if you find it useful but do note that it is published under a Creative Commons licence.

I hope you find it useful.

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Facebook privacy for business users

While B2B social media is about creating and enhancing relationships, in some cases you may find that you risk the lines between personal and business connections becoming blurred.

In order to maintain the transparency and authenticity that are important when using social media to market a business you can use Facebooks’s privacy setting to control who sees what on your profile.

Using these you control the visibility of every aspect of your profile. You can set each section to be viewable by:

• Everyone
• My Networks and Friends
• Friends of Friends
• Only Friends
• Custom

If you select custom you can determine who (which friend lists or specific friends) can or cannot access that part of your profile.

To restrict what your business contacts can or cannot see, organise them into a Friend List – I call mine “Business” – and then apply custom privacy settings to that list.

The process for creating a friend list is simple:

1 – Click on the arrow next to the “Account” menu option on the top right of the page and then select “Edit friends”

2 – On the next page select the ‘+Create a list’ button

3 – In the pop-up window type the name of the list in the box at the top left and then scroll down the list of your friends, clicking those that you want to be in that list.

4 – Finally click the ‘Create list’ button

To apply the appropriate privacy settings to that list:

1 – Click again on the arrow next to the “Account” menu option on the top right of the page and then select “Privacy Settings”.

2 – The “Choose your privacy settings” page allows you to control all of the privacy settings for Facebook. Under the “Sharing on Facebook” section click “Custom” and then “Customise settings”.

3 – For each piece of information you want to control click the drop down next to it and select custom.

4 – In the “Custom Privacy” pop-up window select who you want to see the information and who you want to hide it from. If you only want “specific people” to see the information select that option from the dropdown and then start to type their name or the name of a list of friends in the box.

To hide it from specific people or a list of friends start typing the appropriate name(s) in the “Hide this from” box.

Click the ‘Save setting’ button to implement the changes.

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Not quite the end of interruption advertising

We aren’t quite looking at the Autumn of interruption advertising but we are certainly seeing the end of it’s Summer.

Think about how you find out about products and services.  By watching TV ads? Reading junk mail? Clicking on pop-ups?

More and more people find information by using a search engine or asking a friend or colleague or respected peer for recommendations.

But not everyone.

It’s important to remember that just because you are tuned-in to technology and what it can do, it doesn’t mean that all of your customers are.

Some still buy Calgon™ because of the TV ads. Some still order the 2-for-1 pizza offer because of the flyer pushed through their letterbox. Telephone canvassing can work.

Though at lower and lower rates.

People are getting better and better at ignoring interruption messages by using DNC and DNM lists, caller ID and spam filters and even advert filtering plugins for their browsers.

What this means:

• Social marketing, media and networks will become increasingly important
• As will inbound marketing
• Your website will become less and less significant as a marketing resource in itself. Instead it will serve to capture, filter and direct inbound traffic from social media and web searches.
• Socially and context aware advertising will become ever more important
• You need to start seeing the potential now, and switching increasing proportions of your budget to maintain your RoI

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