"Network Solutions - Small business conversations and working together for small business success" - 3 new articles
From Blogworld: Jeremiah Owyang Tells You How To Listen.One of the more informative and substantive panels that I got to attend while at Blogworld was hosted by Jeremiah Owyang, partner at the Altimeter Group. The topic of the discussion was about the future of social media and its relationship to business. One particular element that I’d like to highlight in this post is this whole concept of listening. For businesses, it’s really important for them to listen to the conversations without jumping right in and trying to sell their wares. Here are eight objectives from Owyang to help define a listening policy: Don’t have any objectives at all. I would imagine this to be a pretty good objective to keep in mind. The best way to actually understand what’s being said is to just not have any distraction. Don’t set any goals or accomplishments in mind when having conversations with your customers and partners. Just listen to them talk and that’s it. Tracking of brand mentions. With social media, the purpose of listening is to understand what others are saying about you and your brand. The objective of listening is to make sure you’re tracking each of those mentions. Through tools such as Radian6, ScoutLabs, Mighty Brands and others, you’re going to be able to do a pretty good job understanding what’s being said – the good AND the bad. Identifying market risks and opportunities. If you’re always talking, how are you going to be aware of what the risks are when foraying into a new demographic or market? The same will go for the opportunities as well. Will you be letting all of this pass you by? Improving campaign efficiency. Once you’ve launched a campaign, isn’t it important to measure whether you’re on the mark with your marketing efforts or would you rather just spray and pray that you’ve achieved the maximum amount of attention? Listen to your audience and you’ll be able to do practically real-time updates to your performance. Measuring support efforts. Like with improving campaign efficiency, by listening to the crowd and the customers, you’re going to want to pay attention to how you’re reacting to them from a customer service standpoint. Just because you’ve reached out and your customers are convinced that they really want to buy your product, don’t make it seem like the service stops there. It doesn’t. Monitor the wave of sentiment towards your product even after the sale. Responding to customer inquiry. This probably can go without saying. If your customer has any complaints, feedback or suggestions, make sure that they feel appreciated. Social media has become customer service. It’s about the people. And their voices can be heard much clearer than yours. Better understand customers. Social media has become market research 2.0. It’s allowed businesses to better understand their customers in a more targeted way. No longer are people just numbers on a table or chart. The human side of research will appear and give you personalities and traits that can go a longer way to make your company a success. Being proactive and anticipating customers. If you think you know your customers, then get out there and anticipate their every move, complaint, suggestion, feedback and even idea. If you know that a customer’s anniversary is coming up, make a proactive choice to reach out via social media to congratulate them. If it’s another special occasion or perhaps just something important in their lives, use it to have a positive connection. Still think that there isn’t enough reason for you to listen to your customers using social media? The objectives given above by Jeremiah Owyang are pretty powerful individually and combined, all eight can really carry some weight with customers. Show them that you care by not talking…and listen to THEIR needs. Tim Kelly heads Network Solutions as CEO and Miles Reidy becomes COOWe made an announcement today 2nd November that Tim Kelly , Network Solutions ' President, will succeed Roy Dunbar as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Network Solutions. Miles Reidy, the company's Chief Financial Officer, has been appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Network Solutions. Since joining Network Solutions about 6 months ago Tim has been focused on expanding Network Solutions' product and service offerings, leading the company's strategic marketing efforts and streamlining Network Solutions operations. Tim came from Sprint/Nextel where he held a number of executive positions including President of Sprint's Consumer Division where he had full operating responsibility of company's largest business unit. Miles Reidy joined Network Solutions as CFO in May 2009 from Sears Holdings Corporation where he was Executive Vice President and CFO. Mr. Reidy's responsibilities include the finance function and now firm-wide operations including Customer Service. Roy remains Chairman and trusted advisor to the company. In Case of Emergency, This Space Intentionally Left BlankRight off the bat, I’m going to admit that this is pretty much a filler entry. I’ve been mostly laid up this week, working from home because I’m stricken with something that’s either a sinus infection or the flu (variety unknown). I thought about turning my illness into an entry discussing how the CDC and other public health entities are using social media to monitor and respond to conversations about H1N1 and other health topics. Or maybe fashioning some clever way to connect the metaphor of viral distribution back to actual viruses. But then I realized that with my clogged sinuses turning my mind to mush, the deepest contemplation I’ve pursued recently has involved gazing into used tissues. Prodigious work, no doubt, but not very useful to the world at large. Similarly, I looked into, then abandoned a few lines of inquiry relating to physical status updates and social status broadcasting and… something. (It pretty much trails off from there.) Even looking into that old standby, my heretofore-reliable slushpile of socially bookmarked del.icio.us links, yields a scattershot collection, nothing that I could unify into a coherent theme, especially in my semi-addled state. So, instead, I will talk about the importance of redundancy and backups when it comes to your social media efforts. (And I’m not talking about hardware or software here — I’m referring to people.) Here in this blog, I’m fortunate to be surrounded by great bloggers and a superb management team who can pick up the slack when I or another blogger falls behind in posting, whether it’s due to travel or conferences or getting knocked down (in this case) by a literal virus. For your own efforts, you want to minimize single points of failure for your social media monitoring and communications. At the very minimum, it means making sure that administrative rights and passwords are distributed (in a secure fashion), so that in the event of the dreaded “hit by a bus” scenario, your operation doesn’t grind to a halt. From the authoring side: In a less-imperfect world, you’d have a diversity of voices, blogging, Twittering, and otherwise representing multiple aspects of your organization, who can take over when you’re unavailable. After all, in addition to helping to provide backup in times of crisis, building in redundancy and extra capability also helps to distribute the load in more routine times. But what if you’re a one-man (or woman) band, where you’re doing everything yourself? That (to employ a well-worn rhetorical delaying device), is a great question. I don’t have a great answer, other than to say that setting and maintaining expectations through transparency and honest communications (see again: first paragraph) is probably your best bet. Also, remembering that microblogging, or more passive, less authorship-intensive lines of communication like social linksharing or retweeting can help fill the gaps between your more robust works. Finally, you can always do this — throw things open to your audience. Hey, what do you think — what coping strategies do you employ when you’re pressed for time but you need to feed the beast? Please leave a comment below. Now excuse me while I go gaze into a tissue. More Recent Articles |
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