Social Media Impact: Part 2

As mentioned in the previous post, what matters most in achieving social media impact often comes down to the degree to which you can be customer-centric, and what you can do behind the scenes to achieve it.  This post will concentrate on the second.

Here goes:

• A smart strategy for achieving connection is to curate every kind of expertise so, for example, always ask which bloggers can help your customers be smarter?  How can you encourage this group to help your customers?  Ultimately, to become increasingly relevant to a community means that you have to further that sense customers want to have re being cared for.
• Find out where Twitter really fits in.  Edison has done a study (and will be offering a webinar on April 29th) on Twitter users of America.  The main idea here:  more growth than you think in terms of overall social media participation, with the caveat if you’re not good offline, you’re not going to be great online. Check it out.
• Are you asking those who like what you do (fans and otherwise) to do anything for you? You have to ask, and then, you have to get customer DNA in your own content to really have it shared.  You can also go to where your customers are or build something where customers would be likely to talk about you.
• Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and therefore, thinking only about appropriating more to yourself and your company, think about partnering with those who can further your cause.
• Train people who can represent you to delight a customer.  This has impact.
• If you have video, put a static image of that video with a PLAY button in an email to encourage clicking through to that video.  Testimonials and direct communication by company founders and key staff can really make an impression and you don’t want to lose out on that possibility for connection.
• To become a social media maverick, take a look, from time to time, what your competitors are sharing. Look them up on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn.  It can’t hurt to know their strategy since in accepting or rejecting their approaches, it will give clarity to your own.