Tasha Harrison

Something lovely and heartwarming came into my life today through Twitter, this wonderful video of a busker on the London Underground. Isn’t social media brilliant!

via @richardpeacock

1. Build a relationship with your customers

   If you walk into a shop and the shopkeeper sits you down, makes you a nice cup of tea and discusses exactly what product is best for you, you are more likely to return. By speaking with your fans and not just at them you can create the same warm fuzzy feeling.

2. Customer services

   There are instances where people may talk about your brand, make a complaint or be unable to sort out a problem through the normal channels. You can monitor social media sites and reply to these people. They may reveal problems you didn’t know where there.

3. Your fans can become your brand champions

   They share your content, they suggest your Facebook page to their friends, they promote your Twitter account through #followfriday. They do the hard work for you.

4. Show your brand’s personality

   What sort of person is your brand? What music do they listen to? What do they wear? This can all be communicated through talking and sharing stuff with your fans and followers.

5. Be consistent

   The way you speak to your fans across all your social media sites should be the same, your fans will expect you to act in a particular way.

6. Create guidelines for your staff

   If more than one person is writing your content, you need to make clear to them how they should conduct themselves and what they can and can’t talk about.

Ever wondered about retweeting? Are you new to Twitter and can’t decipher the strange codes people talk in.

Here is my three point guide to retweeting:

1. An example of a retweet is:
   
   RT @tashaharrison This is a great article http://bit.ly/45t783
2. You can comment on a retweet like this:
   
   RT @tashaharrison This is a great article http://bit.ly/45t783 <– the point he made is worth thinking about
3. You can also reference someone else’s tweet by writing at the end of the tweet:
   
   This article is really interesting and worth thinking about http://bit.ly/45t783 (via @tashaharrison)

Retweeting is a great way of sharing information with the people you follow. It is generally how articles and news are able to travel so quickly to so many people on Twitter.

As we draw closer to the general election we should be prepared to be bombarded by the usual political marketing/propaganda. After the excitement of the Obama campaign we shouldn’t be mistaken for thinking that Cameron or Brown may look at how to leverage social media. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Both have used Youtube, perhaps not very successfully, and Brown does have a Twitter account, as does his wife Sarah.

Perhaps one of the best examples of a politician’s use of social media is Andrew Marshall, the Councillor for Swiss Cottage. He has a blog and Twitter account in which he posts updates about key issues affecting his constituents. This has recently been highlighted by his reaction to the bad weather, where he has asked people to update him on road reports and problems he may not be aware of. He is not trying to sell people a political ideal, he is simply using social media as a tool to improve his communications and make him a better councillor. Essentially, he is building trust.

Facebook is a lot more difficult than people anticipate for marketing. There seems to be a myth that you can simply create a fan page and people will come. The problem is that often there is no reason to become a fan. The page is never updated and once you’ve become a fan you never hear from them again. Often people don’t have time, but usually they aren’t really sure what to do with their page once it’s set up.

Now Facebook have created new rules regarding competitions. You can’t ask people to interact with you on Facebook in order to enter a competition, they can only interact with a third party application. Gone are the days of getting more fans by encouraging them to join you in return for maybe winning something. Now marketers have to be more imaginative in the ways they get fans to sign up. In fact this may not be a bad thing, because simply building up a large fan base and bribing them to interact with you isn’t going to build up a long term relationship.

A few brands that do this really well are Howies and Staples. Howies communicate with their fans, their entire wall is a constant conversation. The fan pictures are terrific, you can tell that the people have really bought into the Howies’ brand. Staples appear to have a really strong presence and you can really see the enthusiasm people have. They’ve built some excellent third party apps as well – I Shred U enables users to delete embarrassing pictures of themselves.

If you are going to embark on Facebook ensure that there is a strategy or some kind of purpose. Is there the possibility of building up a strong community based around your products or services? Or are you running a marketing campaign that will be strengthened by a presence on Facebook? Most importantly, do you have the time to really make it work for you?