The answer is to reward your customers.Want to know how? Keep reading…

Why Rewards?

It’s easy to see that social media and other digital technologies are making a huge difference in the way brands interact with customers and how customers perceive a brand’s image.

With so many new business owners testing the waters of social media, it can be easy to forget what our focus should be. Just like any business situation, the customer should be our first priority, always.

Social media is another great way to drive traffic to your website, people into your stores, and ultimately, money into your bank account. One of the best ways to grow your customer base is to reward them.

Social media and online communities are the perfect playing fields for a customer rewards scheme, and can offer new possibilities to business owners in any field. Let’s take a look at six ways you can reward your customers online.

#1: All the world’s a game—stickers, badges and pins

Commonly seen on “check-in” applications like Foursquare, GetGlue and Gowalla, collectible stickers, badges, pins, medals, stamps, items or trophies add a game-like competition to the user experience.

Not only does this create an urge to collect all the items available, but also a competitive spirit is aroused, as users compete against friends (and “enemies”) to collect more items, more quickly.

As evidenced by Foursquare, users flocked to the location-based app because of the appeal it held by using a leaderboard and creating competition among its user base.

“]

Stickers make a great collectible reward for customers. Photo: GetGlue

How can you use this strategy?

Depending on the size of your customer base, you may want to start your own collecting competition—stickers or digital stamps are cheap and easy to acquire, and if you take the time and effort to design rewards for specific user actions, the “game” becomes more challenging and more interesting.

This strategy is perfect for businesses that thrive on frequent repeat purchases. It could be used to reward repeat purchases, similar to the idea of “buy 5 coffees, get 1 free” you might see at your local café, or to reward customers for recommending friends to your business.

For smaller businesses, jumping on board with an established brand dealing in collectible rewards may be the best way to go. Many small- and medium-sized businesses have started promoting their physical stores as Foursquare check-in points, and many better-known brands now offer exclusive stickers to collect using GetGlue.

The more possible ways a customer can interact with your products, services or staff, the more opportunities you have for developing an engaging, collectible reward system using either of these methods.

#2: Digital discounts: Online-only offers

With discount sites like Groupon growing in popularity, consumers are not only hungry for discounts, but they’re beginning to expect them. Offering discounts, exclusive offers and coupons is nothing new, but focusing this effort on your online audience is a fairly recent idea.

You can choose what you want to offer, the discount you want to give and how long you want the deal to last.

How can you use this strategy?

Whether you’re looking to reward the online customers you already have, or increase the size of your online customer base (or, more likely, both), discounts and special deals that are exclusively available online is a great approach.

You may want to offer coupon codes for a discount in your physical store, which users can print from your website, which will drive traffic to your site and sales to your store. Or you could offer regular discounts or special offers to your email subscriber list. This will encourage new customers to sign up, and give you a bigger and more receptive customer base to send news and information to.

To make this process simpler, you might like to sign up with Groupon or a similar service to offer a special deal to your customers. However, remember that you need to find out where your customers spend their time online before you start, so you can meet them on “their turf,” and reach more people.

#3: And the winner is… Content-creation competitions

Competitions are another tried-and-true way of engaging new customers and rewarding existing consumers. While giving away free prizes can be a great way to reward your customers, content-creation competitions have recently become a popular way for brands to use social media and digital technology to involve consumers, while achieving free publicity.

Any competition that requires a user to create content of some kind in order to enter is a ripe opportunity for brand publicity. A recent example is Microsoft’s Cannes 2011 competition, which required users to create “an entertaining and engaging 60- to 90-second film that shows how a Windows 7 PC is at the core of a student’s life.” This is an obvious example of a competition that led to user-created content promoting the brand and one of its main products.

The grand prize winner received $8,000 in cash and a trip for two to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in France.

How can you use this strategy?

A great prize will encourage people to enter a competition, but it’s also true that the majority of online customers are content consumers, not creators. Therefore, to have a content-creation competition be successful, the prize needs to be more impressive to encourage more effort from users. The Microsoft competition offered thousands of dollars in prize money, as well as a trip to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and a meeting with Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg.

For smaller businesses that don’t have film stars and international flights handy, giving away free products or services may be enough to encourage consumers to make a short video or take a picture, and ask their friends to vote for them.

#4: Say cheese: Involving your customers in advertising and promotions

Another great way to get customers involved in promoting your brand is to directly involve them in your advertising.

Doritos has a great example of a successful campaign called Make an Ad, Make a Fortune, where users created a commercial for Doritos corn chips, with the most popular commercial (voted on by the public) broadcast on prime-time television.

This is the second year that Doritos has handed creative control over to the Australian public to come up with the next TV ad for Doritos.

Another great example is the Vauxhall Corsa billboard competition that ran through a Facebook application. The winning design was professionally painted onto a London billboard, advertising the car.

Graffiti billboard for the Vauxhall Corsa designed by the Facebook competition winner.

How can you use this strategy?

Whether it’s as a billboard designer, a spokesperson in a television or radio commercial or a model for your poster advertisement, offering customers their own “15 minutes of fame” is sure to be just reward for their efforts in promoting your brand.

Ensure that you make the requirements clear and simple and encourage customers to involve their friends to grow your customer base. Choosing a winner based on the most votes received online is a great way to encourage word to spread about your competition, and ultimately, your brand.

#5: Hand ‘em over: Collecting suggestions and ideas

Starbucks is a brand that immediately comes to mind when thinking about businesses that have succeeded in showing customers that their ideas are truly appreciated.

“My Starbucks Idea” is a platform designed to collect ideas and suggestions for improvement from Starbucks’ customer base, and allow other users to vote on suggestions they agree with. The most popular ideas are then implemented throughout the coffee chain.

Customers can make suggestions, other customers can vote on and discuss them, and Starbucks can see which ideas gain popular support.

Dell’s Idea Storm works in a similar way, and both companies have taken ideas from their customers and implemented them. This not only rewards the customers who made suggestions or voted for those they liked, but offline customers win as well, as the company develops in a direction driven by its customers’ desires.

The goal of IdeaStorm was to hear what new products or services customers would like to see Dell develop.

#6: Gracias, Merci, Danke, Xiexie: Thank you goes a long way!

Perhaps one of the easiest, yet most often overlooked, ways of rewarding customers is to simply say thank you.

This may come in many forms—recognition of the competition winner who designed your poster or new slogan, a discount or freebie for repeat purchases or even a simple “thank you” in-store. A simple thanks makes for a more enjoyable visit, and a feeling of appreciation, which will leave your brand with a positive sheen in that customer’s mind.

How can you use this strategy?

Remember those customer feedback forms that were once so popular? Perhaps you still use them in your stores. If you don’t, you should. You can also implement this online—set up a simple feedback form on your website; monitor conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your brand, your industry and your product; and most importantly—listen.

Listening to your customers and implementing their ideas is where the real magic happens. If they’ve taken the time and effort to get in touch with you and tell you what they think, reward them by taking their suggestions onboard and find a way to execute them.

If you send out an email newsletter to subscribers, add a freebie, a discount coupon or an exclusive offer now and then to thank them for subscribing. Perhaps you could set up a discount or special deal for your customers on their birthdays, or even just an email to say “happy birthday.”

If your customers can collect tokens, stickers, points or add currency to their accounts on your website, encourage them to persuade their friends to sign up by giving them bonuses for recommendations.

Using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, you can thank your customers personally by reaching out to them, responding to their feedback, and following up on any suggestions they’ve made to you.

As social media and the digital world continue to grow, increasingly more opportunities are available to businesses, which enables interaction with customers at a level we’ve never seen before.

What do you think? What do you do to reward your customers and make your business stand out from the rest? Leave your comments in the box below.

From Lady Gaga to Oreo, brands have been using freebies to build a social media following for years. The details may change, but the approach is still the same—build a following by giving something away.

In this article, I’ll cover five methods to grow your following using freebies.

#1: Work with Popular Apps

Work with existing applications on social networks (like Farmville) to make your own unique mark with a freebie. You get access to their network of users and they market the offer with you.

Look for apps that compliment your product and partner with them. Offer a great prize or exclusive access and promise only users of the app will get it. This exclusivity makes more people curious about the freebie and drives a following for your brand within the app. For example:

Gagaville takes over Farmville

Although it operates inside Facebook, Farmville is actually a social network within a social network. People connect with friends and build bonds by working together. So when Lady Gaga announced she would launch her own farm, Gagaville, it was a chance for her to connect with this large user base and use it to promote the launch of her new album, Born this Way.

For two weeks Lady Gaga practically owned Farmville.

Aside from being able to feel part of Lady Gaga’s universe, the Gagaville farm gave fans the chance to listen to new Lady Gaga songs before the launch of the album. No other channels had these songs, so for diehard fans this was a fantastic free bonus to be unlocked.

The masterstroke was that songs were given out in the days before the album launch. This gave the Lady Gaga PR team another means of promoting the album and getting fans fired up for launch.

It was also another story for the media to run before the launch, and because it was using Farmville, the story was even more appealing for the press. The album sales speak for themselves.

Billboard.biz reports that this is just the beginning. In an interview with Raquel DiSabatino, Zynga’s director of entertainment and media, they were told “Zynga’s phones have been ‘ringing off the hook’ from various music industry execs looking for ways to work with the company and its games, including labels, managers, and others.” So watch this space for more.

#2: Use Your Facebook Page

If you don’t have a Facebook page already, then make one now. It takes minutes and is a key place to drive people to learn more about your brand.

TOMS Shoes saving the world

TOMS Shoes built a following by giving stuff away, but they don’t actually give it to their customers. Instead they give away one pair of shoes for every pair purchased by a customer. This free pair is sent to the developing world.

TOMS reports on their progress toward this goal via a Facebook fan page—a page with over 900,000 fans. Although the number of fans has no effect on the number of shoes they give away, they’ve still been able to get people interested in their brand by giving stuff away.

The TOMS Shoes' philosophy.

TOMS’ Facebook page is branded with their “One for One” campaign, and they have a PDF available that shows all the good work that they’ve done. Although they would have worked for a good cause without social networks, it has nevertheless proved a very effective way of building a brand following on the network.

TOMS advertises a new shoe via their Facebook page nearly every day, allowing them to capitalize on this audience of fans, even those who only joined to learn about the donations made by the company.

It goes deeper than just Facebook, with FastCompany.com finding that “a standing army of social media activists and over 1200 TOMS university clubs use their online and personal networks to broadcast their love of TOMS Shoes.”

#3: Encourage User Content on YouTube

Create a YouTube account and hold a competition where people need to film themselves to enter. You’ll get viral content from other people doing the hard work, and if you include example videos of yourself and your employees, it gives people something to aim for. For example:

Be the Beatles

To promote the launch of his remastered albums, Paul McCartney (known by many for his involvement in the Beatles band) asked fans to create videos of themselves singing his song “Maybe I’m Amazed.” MSN Music reports that fans could then win advance copies of the album, but only if they got the most views.

Just some of the 135 video entries received.

McCartney then added the best videos to his YouTube account, which builds his own YouTube following by giving fans a central place to observe the competition. The landing page of his profile is branded to promote the new albums. It has a call to action for anyone arriving via the competition. It’s an account with 8,977,352 views.

The competition itself has 135 videos, all recorded by fans who want to win, and fans who want to have the most popular video. As they promote their own video, they are in fact pushing the new albums as well by singing a McCartney song—a very clever strategy.

#4: Promote Via Twitter and Set Up an Alert Using TweetDeck

Don’t just consider your own Twitter account. Give people a reason to talk about your brand on their accounts. Set up an alert on TweetDeck to tell you when people mention your brand on Twitter. Then monitor conversations and reward those spreading positive messages. In time you can encourage more positive brand discussions by offering freebies and rewarding loyal tweeters. For example:

Toyota gives away $1 million

Rather than giving someone a product you can also give money back. Toyota employed this strategy in December 2010 by every day giving 250 people the chance to earn $500 for tweeting that they had bought a new Toyota. This flooded Twitter with brand mentions of Toyota from satisfied customers.

Toyota encouraged happy customers to spread the word for cash.

People tweeting that they had purchased a car was a very effective form of promotion. To see people you follow actively promoting a purchase is certain to increase the likelihood you would consider that brand in the future. With the $1 million offer, Toyota dominated Twitter for a solid month, and gave out a good brand message all round. This helped Toyota achieve an 8% rise in sales year over year (source: The Guardian).

#5: Build a Competition Within Your Own Website

Build a competition within your own website and then encourage people to enter through any social network they wish. Although you don’t need to create any social media profile for this to work, it helps if you register accounts with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. For example:

“Compare the Market” Offers a Dream Job

In a recent Social Media Examiner post, Ben Pickering highlighted how running a sweepstakes is an easy way to increase the number of Likes on your page. For Compare the Market, this sweepstakes focused on a dream job. People were invited to apply for the job of brand ambassador, which would earn them £40,000 ($65,000) for six months’ work. Not a bad payday, and certainly a good freebie.

The winner was revealed from 1,000 applicants.

More than 1,000 entrants then had to promote themselves across social media in order to get the most votes to win. With all of these people trying to get heard, it helped drive traffic to the site in large numbers. Once there, people could Like a candidate, which then drove more awareness of the brand and competition.

The winning candidate made his way to victory thanks to a tweet from Davina McCall, one of the biggest celebrities in Britain, who has over 650,000 followers. It generated amazing exposure for the brand, and that’s just one of the tweets for one candidate. When you factor in all of the other candidates’ efforts, the viral impact of the campaign is impressive.

What are your thoughts on using free stuff to build brands? Have you seen it work anywhere else, or do you feel brands’ marketing efforts are better spent elsewhere? Please share your comments in the box below.

Who writes the books your readers like to read? Experts do. And when these professionals share their knowledge in a new book, there’s one thing they highly covet—book reviews.

In this article I’ll share the power of a book review and how you might be able to review a brand-new book.

Why book reviews are powerful

As a blogger, you’re likely seeking hot tips and new ideas to share with your readers. A good review of a new book accomplishes two objectives.

First, book reviews highlight new ideas your readers can act upon. It also helps your base to know whether they should invest their valuable time in the book. A good book review is good content.

Here’s an example review we did of Scott Stratten’s book UnMarketing.

But a second (often overlooked) advantage is the attention a comprehensive review gains from the author. Bloggers are the press to authors. And trust me, authors watch for and read reviews of their books.

At Social Media Examiner we’ve been able to get the attention of high-profile individuals by simply reviewing their books. And in some situations those efforts have borne fruit that helped our business grow.

For example, authors often share the review with their fans and sometimes these experts have agreed to participate in our events. Pretty powerful, eh?

What makes for a good review?

The best book reviews actually share some of the ideas from the book. They go further by adding the thoughts and opinions of the blogger. A good place to start a review is to share a story from the book. For example, here’s how I did one for David Meerman Scott’s latest book.

Adding a video component when you review the book is also a great way to get the attention of authors. Those reviews can also be uploaded on Amazon for further exposure for you (be aware of Amazon’s 100MB file size limitation).

Here’s me doing a review of David’s book.

Also consider adding the cover image of the book and the author to your review.

A word of caution—be authentic in your review. Authors and your readers can tell when you’re just sucking up to the author.

Want a chance to review a new book?

On June 6, I’ll be releasing my new book: Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition (Wiley). It will share the precise strategy and tactics we used to grow Social Media Examiner into a top blog.

I want to prove that a book can be popular without the traditional media or methods most authors use to promote their books.

I’m inviting up to 50 bloggers to review my new book on their blog and receive an extra copy they can give away to their readers.

Here’s how you could win two free copies of my book:

• Apply here (it’s quick and easy) by May 10.
• Agree to review the book between June 6 and June 30.
• Give away your second copy to your readers in a creative way.

I’ll review the entries and select the bloggers who’ll receive copies of the book.

WAIT, there’s more! (I always wanted to use that line). Social Media Examiner is looking for a new person to write book reviews for our site (in a volunteer role). We’ll be looking for someone among the 50 or so people we select above. It could be great exposure for your business.

Have you written book reviews as content for your blog? What advice can you share? Include your ideas in the comment section below.

But new social media management tools are popping up like weeds and a couple of them might end up being roses. One new such tool is SproutSocial.com.

Here are the 7 ways to tell if you’re ready to graduate from TweetDeck.

#1: Social media monitoring is eating up a lot of your time

Time is money, as they say, and although TweetDeck is handy, its functionality is limited to the few things it does well.

SproutSocial was launched last November and represents a big step up in terms of performance for a modest monthly fee of $9/month—a fee you may or may not be ready to pay.

Among the many things I like about SproutSocial, an elegantly designed browser-based “social media management” tool, is its ability to save you time on multiple fronts:

• Providing an inbox that combines your multiple social streams and then allows you to respond or flag messages for follow-up
• Making it easy to automatically post your RSS feed from your blog to your Twitter accounts
• Helping you to remember the names of the people you follow by auto-suggesting their handles after you type the @ sign
• Scheduling recurring messages easily but without being annoying

Creating a recurring message on SproutSocial is quick and easy.

#2: Social media has become a good source of competitive data

Let’s assume you’ve decided to track a number of keywords and phrases via individual TweetDeck columns. At some point, you’ll end up adding too many columns to view them all with ease on one screen.

With SproutSocial, you can aggregate your searches into one data stream, allowing you to see who’s tweeting about you, your competition and your category. You can also search by company name, which allows you to find which of your competitors are tweeting and the size of their following.

This shows an aggregated stream of tweets by individual keywords and phrases selected by the user.

#3: You want to know when is the best time to tweet your particular topic

Though TweetDeck can help you schedule tweets for a later time, it isn’t much help figuring out the ideal time to do so.

Using SproutSocial’s keyword search frequency analyzer, I noticed, for example, that one of my topics of interest, “social media expert,” was mentioned most on Sunday, suggesting that some prospects were in planning mode on the weekends.

You can analyze keyword frequency by time of day and by day of the week.

I also noticed that my other key topics bunched up during the business hours of 12-6pm, suggesting this might be the best time to engage. SproutSocial also helps you assess frequency of tweets by people and by business—another bit of knowledge that could improve the efficiency of your efforts.

#4: You’re wondering how you’re doing compared to others

TweetDeck is like a nifty broadcast center, making it easy to send messages to all your social channels. But among its many shortcomings is its inability to assess how your social program is performing relative to current best practices.

This is one of the areas in which SproutSocial shines, providing scores for both engagement and influence right on your dashboard. Better yet, by following up with items in your inbox, you can watch your engagement numbers improve, making you even more confident that your social media time is well spent.

The SproutSocial dashboard provides a score for both engagement and influence, which gives you a sense of how you're doing relative to others.

#5: You’re managing multiple accounts across multiple channels

If you’re a TweetDeck user, you already know the advantages of being able to direct the same message to multiple accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But wouldn’t it be great if you could also get a snapshot of how you’re doing across these platforms and toggle back and forth between various accounts?

This is one of my favorite features of SproutSocial, which makes it very easy to add Twitter accounts and then link these to Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn accounts. By bringing these accounts to one place, you can also look at your incoming message streams from each platform, again saving valuable time.

Your inbox on SproutSocial allows you to monitor your feeds from multiple sources, which you can also do on the Chrome browser version of TweetDeck, but not the desktop application that most people use.

#6: You’d like to share progress reports with someone else

Manual reporting is the bane of any of social media manager and TweetDeck offers no relief from this grind. SproutSocial, on the other hand, makes the creation of dazzling reports almost embarrassingly easy.

Starting with your dashboard, you’ll find an instant snapshot of your progress, with six widgets covering things like Twitter stats, most recent clicks and your social scorecard. All of these reports can be turned into PDFs that are easily shared.

The only widget that didn’t work for me was the demographic, which SproutSocial CEO Justyn Howard called a “work in progress [that] will get more reliable in the next few weeks.”

Fully customizable by time frame, this report examines my progress on Twitter over a 30-day period, looking at engagement, influence and message type.

#7: You’ve decided you really want to get leads from Twitter

While TweetDeck makes it easy to add a follower from your topic searches, it offers little help when it comes to identifying the titles of the folks who make up your best leads. This is one of the areas that SproutSocial truly shines.

Because many people put their job title into their public profile on Twitter, using SproutSocial’s “People Search” tool allows you to select the titles of your best prospects. You can also add additional contact info to the leads you track, making following up on those leads that much easier.

SproutSocial makes it easy to find potential leads by searching profiles by particular title. This shows the results of my search for "senior marketers" on Twitter.

Final Note:

Just so you don’t think this is an ad for SproutSocial, let me assure you I have no relationship with this company in any way. I also looked at a bunch of other tools like MarketMeSuite, which got good reviews from others but I found it to be so poorly designed that I simply gave up after a couple of hours.

After using SproutSocial for six weeks, I can assure you that there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “We’ll be adding more in-depth analytics, team workflow and white label offerings in the near future,” Howard explained. The good news is that they seem to understand the importance of customer service and responded to my emails and online inquiries with remarkable speed.

Howard also noted that most of his prospects are using free tools and like you, are currently weighing the potential benefits of “business-specific tools to enhance their efforts.” Which begs the question, would you be willing to pay $9 per month to substantially improve and easily track the performance of your social media efforts? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

You can also check out the Top 5 Most Indispensable Twitter Tools for Marketers here.

Do you use free social media monitoring tools? What are your thoughts on TweetDeck and SproutSocial? Please leave your comments in the box below.

Look no further.  This article will provide an in-depth look at Facebook’s promotional rules.

The Tricky Rules

Running a contest on Facebook is a powerful way to generate buzz, increase engagement, boost your fan count and build your email list. But Facebook has rigorous rules governing what campaigns you can and cannot administer and promote on their platform.

For several years, the contest rules were fairly loose and Facebook users and page admins could pretty much administer whatever campaigns they wished within the confines of Facebook’s general terms (now called Statement of Rights and Responsibilities).

However, in 2009, Facebook severely tightened up their promotion guidelines, causing a great deal of confusion even two years later. To quote Susan Getgood on her post about Facebook contests:

Bottom line, Facebook doesn’t want any explicit involvement in ANY of your contests. It’s all about liability, and the Facebook promo guidelines are designed to distance the social network from whatever companies and bloggers do with their contests.

Every day, vast numbers of page admins—from small businesses to major brands—administer promotions that violate Facebook’s rules.  They are running the risk of having their pages disabled completely. I strongly recommend all Facebook page admins become very familiar with how to safely run contests within the rules.

This post will tell you what you need to know.

What does Facebook mean by a “promotion”?

To quote Facebook:

These Promotions Guidelines govern your communication about or administration of any sweepstakes, contest, competition or other similar offering (each, a “promotion”) on Facebook.

A “sweepstakes” is a promotion that includes a prize and a winner selected on the basis of chance.

A “contest” or “competition” is a promotion that includes a prize and a winner determined on the basis of skill (i.e., through judging based on specific criteria).

So, anytime you run a campaign on Facebook where you wish to select a winner, that would fall into the terms of Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines.

Facebook also says:

You will not administer a promotion through Facebook, except through an application on the Facebook Platform. Administration includes operation of any element of the promotion, such as collecting entries, conducting a drawing, judging entries, or notifying winners.

Simply said: You can’t use Facebook’s features for your promotions!

A promotion where you select winners is not to be confused with you simply promoting and marketing your business—that’s exactly the reason Facebook (fan) pages were designed!

What are Facebook’s contest rules in plain English?

On November 6, 2009, Facebook changed their Promotions Guidelines significantly. Prior to this date, it was pretty much a free-for-all. With the changed rules, Facebook basically went from one extreme to the other.

In order to administer any kind of contest, you had to (1) get written approval from Facebook at least seven days prior to running your campaign, (2) have an account rep at Facebook and meet the minimum ad spend of $10,000 per month and (3) use a third-party app on the Facebook platform.

Then, on November 29, 2010, Facebook loosened up a bit and changed rules.  So, the good news is:

1. You no longer need written permission from Facebook in order to run a contest.
2. You no longer need an account rep at Facebook, nor do you need to meet the minimum monthly ad spend.
3. BUT you still must administer ALL contests on Facebook via a third-party app ON the Facebook platform.

That’s right! You MUST use an app to conduct a contest or risk having Facebook come down on you. Unless of course you’re a big time advertiser with Facebook.

What apps are best for running contests?

One of the most widely used apps is Wildfire app. Their interface is fairly easy to use and their fees are competitive.

Wildfire app

You can choose among 10 different types of promotions, including photo, video, quiz, trivia and more:

Wildfire app promotion choices

Wildfire app promotion choices

See Wildfire’s FAQ to decide among running a sweepstakes, contest or coupon/giveaway campaign.

A wide variety of third-party apps offer promotion services that meet Facebook’s rules. Check out any of the following:

• Fanappz
• Vitrue
• BuddyMedia
• Votigo
• ContextOptional
• BulbStorm
• NorthSocial
• Momentus Media
• Friend2Friend
• Strutta

• UPDATE March 5, 2011: Two additional promotions app services to check out include Offerpop and PromoBoxx.
• UPDATE March 14, 2011: Another promotions app to add to this list is Freepromos (currently 400k monthly active users!). Free for Pages with fewer than 5,000 fans. $100 for Pages with 5,000-50,000. White label also available.

See also this related post: Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page. Plus, see Facebook’s list of preferred developers here.

Can I select a fan at random to give away a prize?

No. This constitutes a drawing where winners get selected. You’re effectively using Facebook to “collect entries.” Plus, you cannot contact winners inside Facebook at all—via email, chat or posting on their wall—nor can you post winners on your page wall.

What you can do, for example, is select a fan at random and feature him or her in your page photo. Or possibly feature chosen fan(s) on a custom tab (link). As long as you don’t have other fans vote or submit nominations, etc.

Toys R Us Featured Fan!

Toys ”R” Us currently runs a fun Featured Fan promotion. Keep in mind the submission and voting is, of course, part of an official sanctioned promotion being run on a third-party app.

Toys "R" Us Featured Photo Facebook contest. Note the link to terms and conditions.

Can I have my fans enter a contest by uploading photos?

Not if you ask fans to upload photos directly to Facebook. Photos, or any content, submitted for entry into a contest can only be done via a third-party app on the Facebook platform. The Facebook app doesn’t count.

From the Promotions Guidelines:

You cannot: Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as posting on a wall of a page, uploading a photo, or posting a status update.

You can: Use a third-party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content to the application. For example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo to a third-party application to enter the contest.

I searched extensively for a Flickr Facebook app, for example, that might be a good workaround for running a contest, but came up blank.

If you do a Google search for “Facebook photo contest,” unfortunately, you’ll see there are scores of Facebook pages running photo contests that do not adhere to Facebook’s terms.

Here’s a fun example of a photo contest—that does comply with Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines—by the United States Potato Board:

Twice Baked, Twice as Smart recipe photo contest

Can I give away a prize to anyone who likes my page?

You CAN restrict your promotion only to entrants who have first liked your page, as long as the promotion is administered through a third-party app on a separate canvas page (now a link, formerly a tab).

Plus, good news! You CAN provide a giveaway and even collect names and emails from fans and visitors to your page. I highly recommend you add a custom contact form to your page. Use the sign-up box code from your own email management system, or create your own form code using something like JotForm, reviewed here.

You can use a piece of “fan only” reveal code to give away a coupon code or special gift to everyone who likes your page. Check out Guy Kawasaki‘s Facebook page for his forthcoming book, Enchantment, where he gives away a free ebook just for liking his page.

Guy Kawasaki—Enchantment Facebook page

See the Facebook page of 1-800-Flowers for a discount code, only revealed to users who like their page.

How can I tell if a contest on Facebook adheres to the guidelines?

Promotions on Facebook need to have clearly set-out terms that are visible right on the canvas page. For example, here’s the Twice Baked, Twice as Smart photo contest rules:

Contest rules for Twice Baked, Twice as Smart

Can I promote a contest on my Facebook page that I run on my blog?

Yes. As long as there’s no requirement to do anything on Facebook; e.g., like your page, comment, upload content, etc. You can simply post a link on your page to the contest. And, to be fully safe, I would also include this disclosure, “This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.”

Is it worth the risk to run a contest without a third-party app?

No, the risks are far too great, in my opinion.  Yes, Facebook does not have the resources to monitor every single promotion on the platform. But, you never know when you might catch the attention of their legal department.

In addition to our other remedies, we may remove any materials relating to the promotion or disable your page, application or account if we determine in our sole discretion that you violate any of our policies.

Facebook is serious about taking action if they discover a violation. My friend, Jonathan Rivera, had an experience with his real estate referral Facebook page where there was an inadvertent use of a trademark. Despite Rivera’s becoming compliant, Facebook shut down the very popular page with tens of thousands of fans. Fortunately, the issue got resolved in a fairly timely manner and Jonathan got his page back intact… under a new name.

So, just take note that any violation of Facebook’s terms is obviously a risk. (Along with directly administering contests and promotions on your Facebook page, two other common violations are setting up more than one personal profile and/or setting up a personal profile in the name of a business.)

Hopefully the fog around contests on Facebook has lifted for you now! All you need to remember is anytime you wish to run any kind of promotion where you select a winner, you’ll have to use a third-party application on the Facebook platform. I’ll be writing a follow-up post covering the specifics of what makes a successful contest. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, what questions do you have about contests? Have you run any successful promotions yourself? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

UPDATE March 5, 2011: It may be that you can run a contest using Facebook‘s new iFrames feature and remain in compliance with the Promotions Guidelines. Essentially, you are creating your own app in order to use iFrames and you host the content on your own site. I’m waiting to hear back from Facebook with the definitive answer and will keep you posted. Also, please note that my use of the term “third party app” includes an app you create yourself if you have the know-how/resources to do so – you basically become the “third party” in this case.

Social media allows you to match data generated by social interactions with individual’s preferences and general interests. This creates useful profiles that give marketers insight into how to tailor future offers and products to their customer base.

In this article I’ll show you five ways to use the data generated by your social network profiles—and those of your competitors—to expand your reach and sales.

#1: Listening Data

Nearly every social media plan tells you to begin by “listening,” but what are you listening for? Monitoring news related to your local business environment and industry can give you a sense of the conversation around your products or services, but social listening allows you to expand this information and make it more relevant.

Specifically, you can gather data about the reactions to your products and campaigns as measured by interactions with messages on Facebook, retweets, mentions on Twitter and comments on your blog.

Measuring the volume, sentiment and relevance of these interactions—and tracking this data over time—will allow you to determine how new products, services and/or offers are received by your customers.

Here’s a view inside Gatorade’s mission control, where the brand reviews insights from social data to drive marketing improvements.

Tools like Google Alerts and HootSuite allow you to monitor basic volume of interactions. If the volume grows to the point where manual tracking is not feasible, there are a few paid products like Radian 6, Meltwater Buzz and Scout Labs that allow you to track data in a more automated fashion.

Some large-scale examples of using listening data for product development and service improvement include Dell’s new Social Media Listening Command Center and Gatorade’s Mission Control. How can you model your listening campaign on these examples?

#2: Benchmarking Data

In the past, it was difficult or even impossible for business owners to know how their efforts and branding stacked up against their competition, aside from observing the general performance of the competitors’ businesses and anecdotal information. Social media data allows you to understand your performance relative to your competitors, because so much of it is publicly accessible.

Once you gather the listening data based on your own company profiles, compare it to that of your competitors to gain perspective on your performance.

Observe the size of your communities relative to your competitors. Also, analyze the relative activity of those communities. Do your fans and followers post more or less frequently than your competitors?

Additionally, you can dig in to see who is following your competition and your own profiles, and compare to see who has more relevant community members for your industry.

Note the relative level of effort required to gain the number of interactions your competitors are driving. If you’re receiving either more or fewer interactions than your competitor, but posting with the same frequency, note the differences in your content and what is driving the disparity in results.

Be sure to account for competitors in each social channel on which you are active, and if possible, benchmark yourself against competitors that are active across multiple channels.

#3: Strategic Forecasting Data

RapLeaf, a social data company, provides insights on customer trends.

While market research groups provided one channel for companies to learn about the interests and perceptions of a few customers, companies like RapLeaf allow you to identify your customer base by revealing key insights and trends about what social networks your customers use, other popular websites for customers, relative location trends and relative demographic trends.

The use of social data allows you to hone your financial performance projections and product development, especially if you produce specific promotions for each social network, and can track revenue and profit from the activities on individual channels. Knowing this kind of information about your consumer base allows for more accurate targeting and the power to personalize campaigns.

#4: Real-time Tracking Data

Traditional advertising channels like radio, television and print were able to provide estimates of effectiveness through quantifying radio ratings, television viewership or magazine sales; however, these ads were effectively impossible to track with any real certainty. Social data allows marketers to view relevant and real-time trends including how campaigns are performing at given time and how alterations to campaigns affect results.

Tools like HootSuite provide real-time tracking of social data to drive business decisions.

Not only do these tracking mechanisms allow businesses to see how a campaign is performing, they allow them to view consumer data at a granular level, identify positive or negative trends and make instant modifications.

This ability, combined with the real-time tracing of consumer sentiment, can mitigate wasteful spending or funding for a campaign that isn’t working as planned.

#5: Reflection and Insight

No matter the level of preparedness a company has in listening, gauging relevance, forecasting and implementing, there’s still a degree of uncertainty in social media. The advantage of robust data tracking services is that you never find yourself guessing why something worked or what caused it not to work. Here is a great post on how to analyze Twitter performance, for instance.

Consumer feedback is usually statistically significant, mostly unsolicited and readily available for companies looking to reformulate their efforts. By understanding a campaign through the targets’ points of view and gaining the ability to quantify their evaluation process, social data can be an invaluable tool for marketers.

How will you use social data in 2011 to grow your business? Is there a particular suggestion that you’ve already implemented and can discuss? We’d love to hear what’s working for your business, so leave your comments in the box below.

Using social media to research competitors can provide useful information for any business looking to create a smart strategy.  Learning about your competitors’ activities can give you insight into what works and what doesn’t.

The beauty of social media is that there’s a ton of information about your competitors that is public. And not only is their strategy public, but the reaction to that strategy is public as well. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can learn about your competitors through different social networks, search engines and other outlets.

Competitor Research Through Twitter

Twitter can be a great source of information, because you not only can view a user’s tweets (assuming they’re not private, which generally business Twitter accounts aren’t), but also a user’s followers and the conversation that’s being directed toward him or her.

Finding Competitors

If you have a specific list of competitors that you would like to research, your best bet on finding their Twitter accounts is to visit their website and look for their social links (usually near a Twitter icon in the header, sidebar or footer of their site). Alternatively, you can Google the company name and Twitter to find their account.

If you haven’t compiled a list of competitors, or your main competitors surprisingly don’t use Twitter yet, you can use Twitter search directories such as Twellow and WeFollow to find other companies in your industry that do.

Tweets

The first and most useful information you can learn from looking at a competitor’s Twitter account is simply the strategy they’re using. By viewing their latest tweets, you can see if their strategy includes promoting lots of discounts; direct replies to their followers; or sharing articles, fun facts or other kinds of tweets. You can judge the success of their strategy simply by looking at their follower count.

Followers

Have you ever wanted to see your competitors’ client list? If so, you might just be in luck, because on Twitter, you can view any user’s followers. Thanks to the new Twitter design, you can easily click on a Twitter user’s followers and see, just by scrolling down the page, a short piece of information about each of their followers from their bios.

Twitter gives you a great overview of any Twitter user's followers.

Then you can click on each one to learn more about them, like their follower-to-following ratio, location and their latest tweets.

Alternatively, you can get an overview of a user’s followers by using Twitter tools like Tweepi, which allows you to see follower details all on one screen, including bio information, location, number of followers and following, number of updates and even when they last tweeted.

Tweepi shows you important Twitter user information in one shot.

Replies

Now, let’s take the research deeper. You don’t want just to know who’s following your competitor on Twitter—you want to know what kind of feedback that competitor is getting as well.

If you do a simple search on Twitter for the replies to their username, @yourcompetitor, you’re bound to learn some valuable information.

Monitor the @mentions of your competitors for fan sentiment.

In the above example, you can see that @Target’s fans like their latest commercial, selection of Christmas items, pricing on certain products and even one of Target’s charitable contributions during the holiday season.

Most Popular Content

Another great Twitter search tool is Topsy. This one is specifically for researching what content on a website gets the most retweets—a sign that it’s the type of content that people like and something that you should consider emulating for your own blog or website.

See the most popular pages tweeted from a competitor's website.

In the above search, you can see a few important things in particular—this company uses services similar to Sponsored Tweets for Twitter advertising, as marked by the #ad hashtag after the first tweet. They also received lots of good feedback and changed their in-store return policy, news that’s being shared often.

Competitor Research Through Facebook

Facebook is one of the top social networks for businesses, and another one where you can find out a lot of information about your competitors’ strategy and fan interaction.

Finding Your Competitors

Again, just like with Twitter, you can find your known competitors’ Facebook fan page links on their website or simply through a Google search. But if your competitor isn’t using Facebook fan pages, you can use the Browse All Pages directory on Facebook to find companies in your industry that are using the search or the category types listed, such as products, services, restaurants and more.

Strategy

There are lots of strategic elements that can be determined by viewing a competitor’s Facebook fan page. To get a full view of what they’re doing, you may have to Like their page with your personal profile.

Once you’ve become a fan, you’ll be able to see all sections (formerly tabs) of their profile. You’ll be able to find out if they’re using their Facebook page as lead generation through gathering email addresses, feeding other social media accounts or blog posts through their page, eliciting customer reviews, creating amazing landing pages or using premium applications from Involver or North Social.

The main strategy you’ll want to check out is how they use their wall for fan interaction. Do they post their latest offers, videos, blog posts, news, photos or other items? Why is this valuable? Because not only will you see their activity, but you’ll also see how it goes over with their customers.

Fan Activity

Unlike Twitter where you have to do a special search for a competitor’s replies to their @username, you can see fan response (or lack thereof) directly on each item of your competitor’s wall. This is a great way to gauge what fans in your industry like the most, from discounts to random status updates, simply by seeing the number of Likes an update receives and reading through the various comments.

See the popularity of an update on your competitor's Facebook fan page wall.

One particular thing to note is that it’s not always updates from the official fan page that get interaction. In the above example on Toyota’s fan page, it’s a fan posting on their wall that got other fans’ attention—a key reason to make sure that your page shows both your updates and those from fans.

Favorite Pages

Facebook fan page owners can add other fan pages as their favorites.

Find your competitors' additional pages through Favorite Pages.

This is a key area to check out, as it may lead you to find more competitors’ fan pages, revealing more of their ultimate Facebook strategy.

Competitor Research Through LinkedIn

Thanks to the new company pages on LinkedIn, you can learn some interesting information about how your competitors are using LinkedIn for business.

Finding Your Competitors

Locate your competitors’ company profiles on LinkedIn via their website, a Google search or using the search box at the top right-hand corner of your LinkedIn screen.

Followers

You can browse a company’s followers using the link in the top right corner of the company profile page showing their follower count.

View a company's followers on LinkedIn.

If you’re not directly connected to followers of a company (first connections) or sharing a connection with a follower (second connection), you’ll only be able to see a limited amount of information about a company’s followers, although it might still be enlightening.

Employees

You can also view information about a company’s employees if they’re connected to them on LinkedIn. If you do share connections, use the links for first connections and second employees in your network (shown in the box above) to see more details about those employees.

Also, don’t miss the helpful statistics about employees, including the following information compiled about all employees linked to the company:

• Job function composition—percentage of staff who are administrative, research, development, sales, marketing and executive.
• Annual company growth—a line graph that compares your competitor’s growth with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Employees who have changed their title—a line graph that compares your competitor’s employee changes with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Employees at the company with new titles.
• Years of work experience—a bar graph that compares your competitor’s employees’ experience with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Highest education degree attained—a bar graph that compares your competitor’s employees’ education (bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, associate’s degree, certification, and high school diplomas) with others in the same industry and of similar size.
• Most common universities attended—a bar graph showing percentages of employees from the top five universities that they have graduated from.

Strategy

With the new company pages, companies can add more information to their profile. View their Recent Blog Posts and Activity on LinkedIn to see what your competitors are doing to boost their profiles and gain new followers.

More Competitor Research on Social Media

Want to go beyond the top three social and professional networks? Here are more ideas on social networks and websites to research your competitors.

• YouTube—check out your competitors’ video marketing strategy by finding their YouTube channel and seeing what types of videos they post and their popularity through number of Likes and comments.
• Social Mention—use this real-time social media search engine to find your competitors on other social networks, and view mentions about your competitors by other social media users.
• Geo-based social networks—are your competitors taking advantage of Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Whrrl or other location-based social media? Find out and be sure your company is “check-in” friendly if applicable.
• Boardreader—don’t just focus on social media! Some of the strongest, most loyal community members can be found in forums. Boardreader will help you find your competitors and any talk about them on forums and message boards throughout the web.
• Local search and review directories—does your business have local competition? Be sure to check out your competitors’ profiles on review sites such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, Google Places and more to find out if they’re garnering reviews from their customers, sharing discounts and taking advantage of local search to dominate in search results.

Do you research your competitors via social media? Please share your tips below, as well as valuable information you learned from doing the research and analysis.

How can social networks become useful marketing and operations tools for smaller businesses that don’t have a large customer base?

This question has kept many small businesses from interacting on social networks, as a recent study showed that only 24 percent of small businesses had begun social media marketing.

Here are five tips to optimize your small business’ social networks to attract more customers online.  Small business owners and marketers do not have the luxury of lots of free time to monitor social networks, so these tips are intended to help you be as efficient as possible.

#1: Make Your Profiles About More Than Just Your Industry

While you should be demonstrating expertise on your Facebook fan page and your blog, you should also be adding local context to this information.  What does the information you are providing mean for your specific region?

If you are selling homes, provide information and links about the local area, as well as the real estate you are offering.  As a small business, you are competing against large national news sources, so provide something the big guys can’t afford to give—local perspective.  The Wydler Brothers Realty Team does just that, offering insights on the Washington, D.C. market as well as homes they are offering in the area.

On their blog, Wydler Brothers Realty offers advice on the general DC area, in addition to their expertise in the real estate industry.

#2: Offer Value

By far the most important tip to getting value from social media for your business is offering value to the customers you want to interact with.  First, make sure your social media presences contain all the information a customer needs to find you on and offline, and provide a clear idea of what your business offers.

Second, define what you’ll be offering your potential customers in return for their attention and time.  You can offer promotions or discounts specifically for fans of your Facebook page, for instance. 

If you do not have the budget for special offers, make sure the content you are offering is valuable to the potential customers you are trying to reach.  Envision the need you are filling for the target customer and serve the customer with useful information related to your business or industry.

Rackspace sees high interaction from polls. Smaller hosting companies could learn from what the market leader is doing, and replicate the types of activities that drive engagement.

#3: Show Consistency

Nothing is more likely to reduce the effectiveness of small business social media outreach than inconsistency and spotty participation.  You can’t expect potential customers to revisit your Facebook profile if it is hasn’t been updated in the two weeks since they first visited, or expect them to make a purchase from your Twitter outreach if you only post 2 updates per month.

For example, Naked Pizza, based in New Orleans, messages its followers on Twitter 1 to 15 times per day.  It is now receiving 20 percent of its total revenue from these interactions.

#4: Diversify and Connect

It takes some time investment on the front end, but reaching out on multiple social platforms—then connecting the different presences with the same themes and message—is crucial to reaching the most possible customers on social networks.   You don’t want to replicate the same message on every platform, either.  Though services like ping.fm are great for simplifying content posting, try to add something unique to each social media presence you maintain.

#5: Be Competitive

Observe your competition and their social media activity.  If your business is the only one in your industry and region interacting on social networks, congrats, you’re ahead of the curve.  But more likely than not, your competitors are experimenting on social networks, too.  Observe what they are doing to grow their base.  Which tactics are working?  Which are not?  This is exactly what you’d do in a competitive assessment offline, looking for ways to improve your process by evaluating your competitors.

Remember to stay persistent, as it takes time to establish robust presences on social media sites.  If you act on these five tips in your social media outreach, you will leverage your time effectively, and see improved results from promoting your small business on social networks.

What techniques have been most successful for you on your business’ social media presences?  Which of these tips do you see the most/least potential in?  Let us know by commenting in the box below!

At a time when businesses are using social media to promote content and start discussions, Avaya has found that listening trumps talking.

“We’re listening to social media and responding,” said Paul Dunay, Avaya’s social media ringleader, who is global managing director of services and social media marketing.

“There is no Tweet that goes unturned. No forum post that goes unturned where our name is mentioned.”

What began as a way to engage and support customers has evolved beyond even Avaya’s expectations. And if Avaya ever doubted its investment in social media, those concerns are now put to rest.

A recent quarter-million–dollar sale, which began on Twitter, soundly answered that question.

Making the Case

Avaya started in 2000 as a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, but its legacy goes back more than a century to the original Bell system. From the earliest phone systems to advanced, unified communications, Avaya and its predecessors have been – and continue to be – at the forefront of the field.

It makes sense then that Avaya would be wherever people are communicating today. The company’s social media activity started informally and grew organically. First, it was mostly a matter of supporting – and keeping – existing customers, many of whom need replacements as old phone systems are retired.

At the time, Dunay followed Avaya mentions on Twitter, which were mostly questions that he forwarded to support reps.

“The old 1.0 way was a call center or inputting tickets on the web,” he said. “2.0 is we’ll try to reach out to Avaya support which is, by the way, me on Twitter.”

With the growth of social media, those mentions soon became too much for Dunay to simply watch on his own. He brought his case to Avaya’s CMO, and left with official backing to build a cross-functional, global, and virtual social media team.

“It was very easy for me to build my business case on retention of existing customers because it’s so expensive to get new ones,” he said

Customer Conversations ‘Everywhere’

Through word of mouth, Dunay found early social media adopters within Avaya’s 15,000 employees, starting with seven people across communications, marketing, support, legal and other business units. As the team began organizing Avaya’s social media strategy, they chose to focus on four main tools: Facebook, blogging, forums and Twitter.

From there, Avaya’s social media was “literally an explosion,” according to Dunay. That team of seven employees has now grown to 50 – all of whom volunteer to participate in social media on top of their regular jobs.

Today, the company has 42 Facebook groups, five Facebook fan pages, one external blog with 10 regular Avaya writers, 10 global Twitter accounts, and 12 LinkedIn groups. Internally, Avaya leverages social media just as much, with 14 internal blogs, 15 wikis, about 3,000 employees on Yammer and some on the recently launched Socialcast.

Facebook serves as the hub, with events, news, discussions and links to blog posts. The blogs discuss trends, innovations and cultural insights. Twitter allows them to post quick bits of information, respond to support requests, and monitor mentions of the brand and competition. Forums enable customers to get help from each other or from Avaya tech support.

With significant momentum, Dunay reported back to the CMO. “She asked, ‘Where are we talking to customers?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ She asked, ‘Where are we holding conversations with partners?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ We’re holding all the conversations in the same places with each one of those constituencies – and then some.”

Contests, videos and other resources engage Avaya’s Facebook fans.

The Eyes and Ears of Avaya

With active listening as the team’s main approach, members found they simply couldn’t be everywhere at all times – especially as mentions of the Avaya name grew to between 1,000 and 2,500 weekly. They turned to Radian6 technology to listen to and measure all social media mentions of not just the company’s name, but competitors’ names, product names, and types of conversations.

“We identified conversations we wanted to go deeply into,” Dunay said. “Wherever conversations about small business and communications happen, we need to be there.”

Avaya tracks a dashboard of mentions, and can choose to either ignore or respond to each. When one member “hears” something requiring further action, he or she posts it on an internal wiki and it’s assigned to someone on the relevant team to address it. That might be support, billing and finance, engineering, a partner, and so forth.

Dunay stresses that none of Avaya’s responses are automated. Who knows what a customer or prospect might say? If your response isn’t tailored to their comments, then you’ve missed the opportunity to connect on a personal level.

The 58-Character Sale

On average, Avaya interacts with a couple of dozen customers through social media on a weekly basis. By listening, the team also comes across sales opportunities. In June of this year, 58 characters of a simple Tweet started the relationship with a potential customer.

“shoretel or avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon,” the Tweet read.

“In less than maybe 15 minutes, we had seen it and figured out what the heck to say to this guy,” Dunay said. “I wrote back, ‘We have some highly trained techs who can help you understand your needs best and help you make an objective decision. Give me a call.’”

Dunay referred the gentleman to a business partner, and 13 days later, they closed a $250,000 sale. At the same time, the new customer’s follow-up Tweet went out: “…we have selected AVAYA as our new phone system. Excited by the technology and benefits…”

“We were there. We were listening. It pays to listen,” Dunay said. “I can’t say we hit 100% of the conversations where we’ve wanted to be, although it’s probably 60–70%. But on our brand name, it is 117%. We’re on every one of those.”

Avaya proactively identifies and responds to support issues using Twitter.

One Tweet Away

By proactively looking for mentions and conversations, Avaya sees issues before they even arise, before anyone contacts the company. A response to a social media mention truly makes an impression on customers, prospects and partners. “We are the early response center for things happening in the marketplace,” Dunay said. “They love knowing you’re one Tweet away.”

Avaya’s social media team grew quickly, but Dunay has an even bigger vision for social media.

“I don’t think it should be 50. I think it should be 15,000. Everyone should have a hand in it,” Dunay said. “We definitely want more people deeper and broader in the organization.”

“Our goals are to have deeper, more interesting and more pervasive conversations with as many people as we possibly can,” he added. “Why wouldn’t you take every opportunity for your brand to build better and deeper relations with every customer you can?”