Tips to Enhance Your Business Through Social Media - Overview: The Basics of Social Media, Communities vs Audiences, The L.E.A.R.N method, Leveraging Social Media for growth and cost reduction, and helpful tools

1. Tips to Enhance Your Business
Through Social Media
Presented by: David Salinas & Peter Sena
principles of Digital Surgeons

3. Overview
• The Basics
• Communities vs. Audiences
• The L.E.A.R.N method
• Leverage Social Media for growth and cost
reduction
• Some helpful tools

4. The Basics: What is Social Media?
• Websites, blogs, and social networks that
create a foundation for users to search,
connect and share information with one
another in a community

5. The Social Ecosystem at a Glance

6. The Shift to Social Media
• Traditional media is what a brand wants to say
• Social Media is what consumers want to hear

7. Online communities own the web.
• 4 out of 5 top viewed websites are social
communities – Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube, Myspace
• YouTube has 10% of the total Internet traffic
• U.S Facebook monthly viewers over 100M+
• 100 million+ active blogs
“Opting out of the benefits that user-generated content
affords is no longer a healthy decision.”
Razorfish: Cultivating Effective User-Generated Content July 2009.

8. What We Know:
Brands using Social see success.

9. What We Know:
People using Social see success!

10. Its all about the people...

11. Lots of people.

12. What we know:
People = Audiences
Audiences become communities.
…and everyone has an audience.

13. What we know:
Communities have leaders.
Leaders are influencers.
Who are your influencers?

14. The L.E.A.R.N Method
• Locate
• Engage
• Analyze
• Respond
• Nurture

15. Locate
• Search for your
company and brand
• Read industry blogs
• Locate your audience
and see what the
influencers are saying
• Monitor Google Alerts,
brand and product
mentions

16. Engage
• Entertain
– Provide interesting content
• Teach
• Help
– Offer support
• Give
– Promotions, sweepstakes, coupons, gifts, can be virtual vs. tangible

17. Analyze
• What is the overall tone of the
responses you are receiving?"
• Positive vs. Negative"
• How are you going to handle
these responses?"
• Individual vs. Mass
Announcements

18. Respond
• Who’s going to do it?
• Uniformity guidelines
• Don’t just respond to
negative feedback
• Praise for positive feedback
• Remember: customer
feedback is public, so is your
response
• Customers are ultimately
promoters. How you respond
is how they will promote your
brand

19. Nurture
• Customer Service
• People are looking for a response and
answers to their questions
• Respond to feedback

20. Remember to SELL last!
• Selling first = spamming
i.e “Buy my product” or “visit my website”
• Turn happy people into promoters
• Empower users of your products/
services and cause people to interact
with each other

21. Ways to Leverage Social Media
• Promotion & Engagement
• Customer service
• Job recruitment
• Collaboration

22. Promotion"
Case Study: Edible Arrangements
• 100,000 new fans in
under 3 days
• Within 3 weeks over
167,000 fans
• Sales saw an
immediate rise (call
center, internet, and
in-store)
• Increased excitement
and engagement
around the products

23. Engagement"
Case Study: McDonalds
• McDonald’s did a
survey: fans are
interested in content.
• And they have
1,400,000+ of them.
• You need to earn the
right to participate in
customer communities
• Facebook, Twitter,
Microsites for
employees

24. Customer Service Case Study: JetBlue
• Customer Service
• 18 million Twitter users (2009)
• 1.4 million followers
• Staff of 6 that tweet
• Not full-service
• Information booth
• Don’t duplicate your efforts.

25. Customer Service Case Study: JetBlue
• FAQ is there for a reason!
• Volleyball game – push the ball back in their
court
• What remains “outside the norm” is where
you come in
• Be nimble, thorough, and responsive!

26. Job Recruitment"
Case Study: Digital Surgeons"
• Reducing Costs of Talent Acquisition
• Reduced time to fill position by expanding
reach
• Avoid high recruiting fees and incorrect fits
• Increased access to pipeline and talent
planning
• Identify culture and set the tone early

27. Collaboration Tools of the Trade"

28. Listening & Monitoring Tools
– Customer reviews (Google Review, Yahoo Reviews)
– Google Alerts (News and Blog Search)
– Topsy
– Bit.ly and other URL shorteners
– Twitter Search – separate feeds for different search
strings /keywords
– Technorati Blog Search
– TweetBeep – a good backup to capture mentions of your
brand on Twitter
– SocialMention.com
– Icerocket.com
– Backtype – search among blog comments
– BoardTracker – search forums and bulletin boards
– Facebook Polls
• Realtime user feedback to questions

29. Key Takeaways
• 1) Listen 2) Engage 3) Sell
• Walk before you run
• Think outside the box. Social Media is not
“one size fits all”
• Different industries = different audiences =
different communication channels
• Be flexible and nimble: new trends are
around the corner