Marketing

Sarah Worsham / Mar 5, 2009

Twitter Tip – Automate Tweets with Twitterfeed

The point of Twitter is to have a conversation, but it also nice to send out useful information to your followers – perhaps links of interest or a link when you post to your blog. Twitterfeed allows you to use RSS feeds to automatically send links to your Twitter account. Just add the RSS feed from your blog to Twitterfeed and you will automatically tweet the blog title with a link whenever you add a new post.

Once you have an account you can add any RSS feed and tell Twitterfeed how often you want it to post items from your feed (every 30m, every hour, etc) and how many items to post (1-5). Twitterfeed will only post new items, so don’t worry about posting redundant content. Once you add a feed it may take a few minutes for Twitterfeed to pick it up.

Twitterfeed can also be used to post directly to identi.ca and custom laconica installations. Using Twitterfeed in conjunction with Ping.fm or HelloTxt you can also post to any sites those services support.

Here at Sazbean, we use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and links we add to delicious.

If you use Twitterfeed, we’d love to hear how in the comments.

Technorati tags: twitter, twitterfeed, content strategy, business, social media, marketing, strategy

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Sarah Worsham / Mar 3, 2009

Empower Your Employees to Help Your Customers

Yesterday Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer wrote a post about whether brands were playing favorites on social media. The problem is that many customers have problems, but often it seems that people who are influencers – who have a popular blog or twitter feed – will get responses from companies that normal people can’t seem to get through normal customer support channels. I commented that right now many of the people monitoring social media at companies are higher up and actually have the power to fix problems.

Why is this exactly? Why do people have to complain on Twitter or their blog or to their influencer friends to get their problems solved? Most of us have had an experience with a customer support system where the employee had to follow a script and wasn’t allowed to make any kind of decision. You usually have to try to get up to a manager or another department and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll get any kind of decision.

What would happen if you allowed your customer support employees to make decisions? You’d have to provide them with some guidelines, obviously, but what if they could actually help your customers? Many years ago I used to work a few hours a week at Bed, Bath & Beyond (ok, mostly for the discount). They allowed their employees to give up to a 5% discount to any customer for any reason (usually having to do with a flaw in the merchandise). Do you know how happy it makes a customer when they come up to you to show you a flaw in a product, ready for a fight, and you just give them a 5% discount without arguing? How many of those customers were repeat customers? I’d imagine quite a few. I’m sure BBB made up the 5% discount with increased sales from happy customers.

All the employees at your company will influence your brand and reputation. If you give them the power to make decisions that help customers, it will only help your company in the long run.

(photo by dan taylor @ FlickrCC)

Technorati tags: brand, brand reputation, brand strategy, business, customer service, customer-centric, customer support, marketing, strategy

Sarah Worsham / Mar 2, 2009

Statistics are Vital to Marketing

measurechantrybee Last week I posted about attaching dollars to statistics in order to make sense of them (and to relate them to how your business is doing). During a discussion about the article, someone mentioned that it was a great non-marketing post. I didn’t really respond at the time, but the statement has bothered me since. Statistics are vital to marketing. Without statistics, marketing is just a hit-or-miss blanket approach without a strategy and end-goal. Statistics are how you know what is working and what should be improved (or dropped) and figuring out the next step to achieving your business goals.

Using statistics properly will show how various marketing efforts are affecting your bottom line (return on investment – ROI) so you can figure out how much to spend – and on what. You’ll also learn more about your customers, your product, and your business. Statistics can give you information about how to improve your product, how to increase customer satisfaction and what your business is doing well.

Many people think of marketing as a soft, touchy-feely pseudo-science, but done properly, marketing should be just as measureable as other business processes and should provide vital information to run your business.

(photo by chantrybee @ FlickrCC)

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