Despite this there are some real benefits for a small business in using Twitter and one true caveat that will mention at the end of this post.

Six Small Business Benefits of Using Twitter

I recently came across this article from the Kherize5 Marketing Agency on Six Small Business Benefits of Using Twitter:

1. Expand Reach. As a small business it can be expensive to advertise to build awareness. Twitter allows you to search, converse and engage while at the same time gaining exposure for your product/service.

2. Interact with Customers. Most small businesses attract new business by word-of-mouth.  Tweeting with customers shows that you are attentive to their needs and do not stop after the sale is completed. This also provides almost instant feedback on your product/service and saves time and effort in researching reviews that customers may have posted on other sites.

3. Receive & Share Information. Following leaders in your industry will provide invaluable information that you inturn share with your followers and/or customers to show your level of involvement in your industry.

4. Offer Help. Searches assist in finding people who are in need of help.  Offering a solution allows you to showcase your area of expertise and engage people. This will take time to become a trusted information source however while interacting with people, it will expose your business offerings.

5. Enhance Email Marketing.  Whether you are currently utilizing email marketing campaigns or plan to in the future, Twitter is another source to further the campaign by driving people to the landing page for the email.

6. Meet Local People. One of the biggest benefits of Twitter is to meet-up with other local tweeters. This is not just another networking event where people just show up, Tweetups bring together a community of people that acquire and share information.

HOWEVER….Consider the Opportunity Cost of Twitter as You Integrate it into Your Small Business

While you think this might be a whole new sales channel, you should consider the opportunity cost of Twitter. Direct Marketing Observations blog defines it well – “Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics because it implies the choice between desirable, yet mutually exclusive results. Which is desirable? Making a cold call or reaching out via Twitter to someone you might get business from? Which is a more effective use of your time? Are the results mutually exclusive? Maybe. But not immediate.”

They go on to say “The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently. If I have 2 phones and 2 computers with 2 Twitter accounts-which will be more efficient in the long run? Or the short run for that matter. Opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs:  it can be the real cost of  lost output or lost time. Twitter can be quite  inefficient when it comes to working it into the prospecting flow of your work day and treating it like you would your outbound marketing. You have to know how to use it correctly. It compliments, but it doesn’t replace.”

You can easily just pick up the phone and reach out but like e-mail or web sites, it is a way to reach out and engage with current customers or start a conversation with a new customer that might see Twitter as its primary communication channel.

Are you Using Twitter? What has been your experience? Leave a comment.

So is your small business already using Twitter? What has been your experience? Please leave a comment and let’s have a conversation about this interesting topic.

Recently, Twitter has finally started to show its business model and realizes that one way is to help companies and brands utilize Twitter for all sorts of things. Network Solutions in fact utilizes it for customer service and community outreach and has seem immeasurable success in using it along with providing a channel for customers to reach out. You can find us at NetSolCares.

The new Twitter Guide for Business, uses this explanation for businesses thinking about signing up but asking about what it does, what they can use it for and the value/return they could see from it:

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

I have found that there are three primary ways to effectively use Twitter for Business:

1.) Customer Service – This is probably what Twitter is known the best for in business circles with companies like Comcast, Dell, Starbucks, Zappos and Etsy to name a few using this channel to communicate with customers having issues or to thank them when there are positive mentions. Network Solutions has use NetSolCares to great success and I think about how many issues have been resolved or the customer put in touch with the right person because they reached out on Twitter and we listened.

2.) Community Outreach – This goes beyond customer service to informing people abou things that will help their business and engage the broader community. This can be done on the same channel as customer service and we use this channel to post blog headlines from our various blogs in addition to putting out notices to the community about changes or issues they might be experiencing (e.g. System Downtime on Friday for new Network Solutions brand switchover).

3.) Selling those that want to be sold to – This is a challenging on that Dell Outlet does extremely well. They have often said that they make $1 million a year off of Twitter. This is because they set up a specific Twitter channel/handle for selling Dell Products.

What Ways Has Your Business Used Twitter Effectively?

I know I mentioned the “Top 3″ but I want to start the conversation and hear from you how you are creatively using Twitter with your business and gather a longer list of best practices for everyone in a future post.

Or maybe it’s simply brain chemistry, where the act of being helpful to others *dings* our dopamine receptors, causing us to bliss out a bit and feel connected to the larger human community.

In the physical world, altruism could mean anything from changing a tire, foiling a purse snatcher, or rescuing a kitten stuck in a tree (to cover a standard trio of altruism cliches). However, online altruism, especially in distributed online communities, is largely sharing knowledge and effort. Which is why it’s so powerful — harnessed properly, you can find a way where anyone can be helpful. (I’ll leave the monetary donations bit out of it, as I think it takes us more into the transactional / business context.)

So how can we exploit altruism online?
Or, to put it less cynically, how can we facilitate helpful behavior online, extend it, and leverage it for a wider audience?

Companies and organizations are perpetually surprised to rediscover that their customers and users, when left to their own devices, typically form communities of self-help, which, with a little nurturing, can help provide helpful answers that would otherwise hit the customer service front lines.

Of course, altruism doesn’t mean we aren’t also selfish, or self-interested. We are still imperfect beings. And no one likes being a sucker, as defined by other people profiting from your efforts.

So here I will reiterate a few things you can do to help people help others, which helps you:

* Appeal to enlightened self-interest: They say true charity is anonymous, but I know I’m rarely that selfless. Helping others is very often an opportunity for users to show how smart and dedicated they are. Sometimes this can be encouraged by superficial trappings like badges and custom avatars, but often it’s measured by peer user ratings, high post counts, or even a low user ID nubmer (which shows you’ve been around for a while.) But very often, it’s simply internal recognition that you are a go-to person for particular topics.

* Give official acknowledgment and credit where credit is due: Recognize quality user contributions and highlight them from official, canonical places. Here’s an example where you might not expect — in radio traffic reports, you’ll often hear,”Cell caller Jimbo reports rubbernecking delays on 495 westbound.”

In this case, a first name isn’t personally-identifying information (except to the person who called in the tip), but it lends credibility, and shows that you’re actually using user-submitted reports, which encourages others to participate.

Official recognition is even more valuable in the online context, where you can also link to a user’s profile or a body of work, and where admins, developers, or other official representatives can interact with users.

* Join people to the larger community: Remember, helpful community behaviors don’t just happen on your site. In fact, depending on how far along your corporate or government communities are, chances are the thriving member self-help communities are taking place far off your site. Use search and monitoring tools to find out where these other communities are, find out their norms and cultures, and participate where they are (without necessarily trying to get them to come play in your space.

I’m not blazing new trails in this blog post, but if I’ve left any relevant tips on how to mobilize users’ altruistic impulses for the benefit of all involved, please leave a comment.

Fortunately for the rest of the folks on the plane, the co-pilot and a fully-qualified relief pilot were on hand to land the plane without incident. In fact, most of the passengers had no idea that anything was out of the ordinary (save for an “is there a doctor in the house?” announcement over the PA system) until they were down on the tarmac and saw all the emergency vehicles.

So here’s the question — should the passengers have been told what was going on, while it was happening?

On the one hand, it’s not like any passenger could have done anything to influence the outcome, so why cause any unnecessary worry?

On the other hand, even on a plane over the middle of the ocean, there’s no guarantee that passengers wouldn’t have found out about it. I’ll have to doublecheck the timeline of events, but I believe that news Web sites were flashing breaking news banners about the flight while it was still in the air. (This was the case, for example, when a JetBlue plane had to make an emergency landing because of stuck landing gear, and the passengers, who’d been informed, were watching themselves on the inflight TVs).

If that’s the case, then all it would have taken is one inflight telephone call, and suddenly all bets are off and the air crew has to do damage control and panic prevention at 30,000 feet, on top of actually operating the plane.

I imagine that if the plane had in-flight Internet access, there would have been no question about disclosing what was going on. As mobile Internet becomes ubiquitous, there are fewer and fewer places where you have guaranteed control over the access to information, so transparency and disclosure become even more important.

To take a cynical view, transparency is a way to keep the initiative over releasing information that people might find out about anyway. It’s a matter of enlightened self-interest.

This brings up a second anecdote related to airlines and disclosure, namely when to keep your mouth shut (I’ve referenced this article before). The author notes that some announcements just don’t need to be made, especially when they raise questions that might not otherwise be raised — this particular example was a pilot announcing to passengers, “We have enough fuel to get to Boston.”

While 100% accurate, it was also 100% unnecessary — that you have enough gas to get to your destination should be implicit (unless your chosen airline has a reputation of diverting to backup airports because of fuel management snafus, in which case I would question your decision-making skills).

Of course, if a passenger asks how much fuel is on board, this is where transparency and disclosure come into play, as well as knowing how to answer the question that the passenger is really asking. For an aviation buff, you might give the exact fuel load in pounds; for a nervous flyer, you might contextualize it by saying it’s plenty to reach our destination, as well as primary and secondary backups (assuming they’re just looking to be reassured).

Does this mean that, as an air passenger, I should be continually pinging the air staff, “Excuse me, are the pilots still alive?” I’m not sure how to answer that.

Do you think the passengers should have been told what was going on? I’d like to hear, as well as any other opinions you might have about transparency and overdisclosure, so please leave a comment.

Because they’re enabled by what we used to call microblogging (really, social broadcasting and social status sharing), I’ve been thinking of these episodes as “microrage.”

I don’t have empirical data, so I’m just going by my perception of the rapid fading of some of the more recent socially-transmitted outbursts, like Motrin Moms, AmazonFAIL, and the Domino’s Pizza hoax. Unless you’re a social media or social marketing person, or one of the hardcore offendees still clinging to a boycott, you’ve probably forgotten about them already. (Though, in the case of Domino’s, the ReadWriteWeb article back in April cited a market survey that showed Domino’s was still recovering from the perceptual hit they’d taken. I wonder what more recent data shows.)

Here are a few aspects of microrage:

The Hotter the Flame, the Shorter the Burn
Previous grassroots-driven PR crises (as opposed to authority / media-driven phenomena like the 1982 Tylenol cyanide tamperings) were characterized by longer, slower burns. (With more mellow flavor?) So even though issues took longer to build up momentum, it also meant they were in the public eye and mind for a longer period of time, with more time to propagate, and more time to make an impact (especially as each additional update bumped things up back to the top, to borrow an internet message boards convention). And to steal a metaphor from the epidemiologists (well, from the Pandemic 2 game, anyway), a disease that is too virulent or too deadly to its host can burn out quickly, before it can become widespread among the population.

A Global Village of Outrage
Another factor is geography. Or more precisely, the absence of geography — what might have been merely a local interest story previously (unless it got picked up by a wire service, weird news aggregator, or news gatekeeper) now has the potential to go viral and go global. Essentially, there’s a whole lot more to be outraged about.

However, microrage engages people on a different level — on the surface, the issue engages you, but it’s also  abstracted from you because it’s distant from you (you still care most about the stuff that impacts you directly, which tends to be local to you). Ultimately, unless it goes to one of your core issues, it doesn’t have the same kind of staying power.

(One particular example I was looking at was the “blink-and-you-missed-it” dustup over an unfortunate conflation of headline and content in a Yelp SF anti-rape ad from a few weeks back. It’s not a great example, since it’s more of a navel-gazing, San Francisco / new media gossip story than anything else.)

The Effect of Early Intervention
The last thing that I’ll observe about microrage is that it seems awfully amenable to a good response and good outcomes. I don’t want folks to come away with the impression is that microrage just goes away by itelf. It may be that the thing that keeps the microrage from growing into regular, popular rage, is early warning and prompt response. (Relatively speaking — for example, in AmazonFail, a credible response at the very outset might have prevented the episode from bubbling up into microrage at all.)

However, because microrage is so fickle, anyway, anything seen as a good-faith effort to make things right might be enough to let people check off the box and move on to the next thing.

Anyway, I’m still iterating on the concept of microrage and the role of intervention. If you’ve got a comment on what I’ve put down so far, I’d love to hear it.

“You can only choose one. Which one do you want,” she asked.

The boy chose the one that directly in front of him. The one he could easily reach out to and take without any fear. He was eager to tear open the pages of whatever adventure awaited beneath the cover.

“That one?  Are you sure?”

He nodded and they were off. I don’t know if he ever enjoyed the comic, but I saw, for that moment, he was completely confident and excited about his choice.

Right then and there, I had my topic.

The rush hour of small business marketing.
With so many people reaching out for your prospective clients’ attention, it’s getting harder and harder to see yourself as the clear choice.  It is easy to get overwhelmed with choosing where to advertise, how to cast the widest net, and what your message will be to get their attention.  It can be frustrating with every niche item salesman suggesting what bit of swag will be sure to lure in that potential client, the local print shop touting the latest sale on brochures and postcards, networking events crowded with the same people over and over again, and yet have you noticed what you want…seems to be right where you need it?

I’m not advocating you ditch any of the tools above, but simply recognize them for what they are. They are tools and avenues to get you to the next prospective client.  But if these avenues are backed up with rush hour like traffic fighting for attention, why would you take them? Because they are safe bets? Because everyone is doing it? Because you are a bit afraid to feel like you wasted your all ready limited resources on an unproven tactic?

But what if you take these choices and you end up with a closet full of key chains, boxes of never seen brochures, and networking events where you end up collecting the same business cards from the same people just on different days?  Isn’t THAT a waste of your valuable all ready limited resource?

Be where you’ll get the most eyes.
Instead of trying to create tactics and plans that brings them to you, try getting out and going to them.  Seriously, go where your future long term customers will be. It could feel awkward at first, but if you’re the first person to tap the well of uninterrupted visibility then you’ve got nothing to loose.

The best example I’ve seen of this was just yesterday at an office where I am doing some contracting.  In their kitchen, right on the refrigerator door, was an advertisement for a Babysitter.  The design was clean, clear, and simple.  There was a pocket, made of folded paper, stapled to it with business cards sticking out. The business cards were even clearer than the flyer. They simply read, in a welcoming font,

“Nicole.
Babysitter.”

And below that were her phone number and email.

This wasn’t done in an off the shelf font, but it was neatly presented and easy to read. No fluff designs or overly wordy content. The business card laden flyer was close to eye level with anyone going to get their lunch.

Nicole tapped a market of an office made up of probably 60% of her chosen clients. She went right to where she would get the most eyes on her services.

Needless to say, I’ve seen Nicole’s simple business card holder refilled at least twice since the advertisement went up.

Be brave with your limited resources.
Don’t be afraid to take chances once in a while. Get out there and go after your prospective clients with the same excitement you started your business.  After all, they are your clients after all, right?  Instead of the next tried and true moderately successful “everyone’s seen it, done it, and got the t-shirt from it” tactic, get a little creative with your limited resources.

If you’re an auto detailing company, offer to wash cars in the parking lot of your local office building for free in exchange for letting people know about your services.  If you’re a business coach, give away coupons for a free session at a networking event for small business owners.  If you’re an author with a new book to peddle, go to where your reader will be and give out free sample chapters of your book with info on where to get the rest of the great, amazing best seller to be. What ever it is that you do, be bold, be creative and be fearless in whatever your marketing endeavor will be.  Failures will happen, but successes will as well.  Be more focused on the later and conscious of what caused the former.

If you’re wondering, yes, I’ve seen the aforementioned suggestions done, but those business owners wanted the clients and weren’t afraid to take a calculated risk to reap a little long term reward.

But the real question is…are you?

As all ways…stay wicked.

Overnight something wholly amazing happened.
They opened their email box one morning a month into the passively pushed campaign and found they had, honest to Bob, over 7,000 submissions requesting to be a part of the campaign. Emails poured in from all over the nation taking part in the submission. We all clamored to the marketers’ desk to see this with our own eyes. An email box so overloaded with requests it called to mind the commercial of the new business that puts its store online and the orders just keep going up, and up, and up. Just like the emails that continued to pour in.

From joy to panic.
Some thought it was spam. Some were excited at the potential of something they did being that “viral”. Some freaked out at how they were going to service all of the requests with a limited supply.

With one of their web team helping, I started looking through some of the emails to see if we could detect signs of spamming. We couldn’t find any that were that obvious. The submission forms were filled out were each unique, accurate, and different, that the only thing that kept the curiosity of it being spam was the frequency of how these came in. It was roughly twenty emails a minute with each second a part from each other.

The Google Search is strong with this one.
So there we sat, debating on what to do, and I thought “Google will have the answer”. I threw the name of the campaign between some quotes in Google’s search box and hit send. My screen, and Google’s Search results, were maxed out with Freebie Sites, sites that do nothing but list where to find, and how to get, free stuff online, listing the “Free Gift” that came with campaign and how to get it.

I figured, “if it’s already this deep into Google…where else could it be”. I turned m search to the tools of Social Media. The links started popping up on Twitter with a link back to the directions on how to get the “Free Gift”. It was in different spots all throughout Social Media.

In a very short time, less then ten hours, the “Free Gift” had spread like wild fire. It was time for some damage control.

From excitement to frustration
From there, I created a timeline of when the first Freebie Site listed the campaign, which linked off of it, when other posts picked it up, and cross referenced it with when the emails came in and how often they spiked. Yeah, I know, I’m a geek. My wife reminds me constantly. Sure enough, the spike in email requests coincided with each time the campaign appeared on a Freebie Site.

This wasn’t spam after all, but an army of people who collectively thought the “Free Gift” was worth their time to blog about the “Free Gift” and share how sign up for it. They rallied their own troops, got the message out, and took action on it. This was truly an example of the kind of Viral Marketing companies’ dream of!

Yet notice nothing in that last paragraph talks about the connection with the campaign, the belief in the goal, sharing the message of the campaign over the free gift, or any positive remarks about the non-profit’s effort?

With learning that submissions were still flooding in, we closed down the submission request box. I sent emails to the Freebie Sites letting them know what the intention of the campaign was and how we hoped they update their info. Some did and thanked us. Some ignored us. I sent a few emails to those who submitted letting them know what happened. Some did and thanked us. Some got frustrated and said that they did what the website said and they wanted their “Free Gift” anyway. Some ignored us.

The moral of the story, kids.
This outcome was not what they expected, or intended, when they created their marketing campaign. They just wanted to add a little value for being a part of it. Those online saw the value not in supporting the campaign, but just filling out whatever they needed to get the free item they wanted.

Rather than give a long, lengthy explanation, here are the top five things the non-profit quickly learned:

1. Be proactive on learning the reason once you find a negative reaction to your campaign.a. You could have unintentionally created it. If you sit back and blame the people doing the very thing you asked them to, but for a different reason than you intended…you get nowhere.
2. Accept the mistake, learn from it, and work with it instead of running away from it.a. It’s safe to say, that on the next campaign this will be something that will be brought up and avoided.
3. Don’t give into our initial fear.a. Fear can cause you to assume your first reaction is the best one. Sometimes that’s not the case. Imagine what would happen if they thought they were spammed instead of doing the research?
4. Find out what worked, what didn’t, and, depending on your outcome, how you can either duplicate that later on or never let it happen again.Clearly the free gift had value to people. Is there something that they could leverage in this?
5. When people ask for your free gift that does not mean they are interested in you.a. Free gifts are great. They little items, that shouldn’t break the bank, that if well done should spark conversation or curiosity. They should not be a crutch to get people interested in you or your company.

I say, give “Free Gift” away, but don’t let the value of the gift be greater than the message. There are some really big marketing lessons in this that came to light. What, life lessons, have you learned from you marketing experiences?

Until next time, stay wicked.

If you liked it, please Tweet it.

…in a good way. His post “Backwards Work” stuck with me for a solid day, because he’s absolutely right. You’ve got to know the rules to break them, and you need to know what you want your end result to be before you start swinging for the fences. As Chris said, “know what it is you’re shooting at before you draw back.”

So without rehashing everything Chris wrote (its damned fine blog post on its own so go read it), I want to talk about the one thing that will help secure success…excitement in marketing your own company.

Excitement in your company period. Because, if you aren’t excited about your own business…no one else is going to be!

If you really want a good example of what passion and excitement for your product, brand, service or what it is that got you to start your own business, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better example than Gary Vaynerchuk. When I’m getting frustrated in what it is I do for a living, I go to YouTube and check out his talk from Web 2.0 Expo NY from September 2008 on “Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape,” and I get pumped all over again.

Now calm down, Sparky. I’m not telling you to go out and be Gary, but you can take a few things away from that talk that will help you. Gary’s passion for the things he loves (like wine, personal brand, and the New York Jets) is empowering. He loves what he does, and it pays off in spades? Take a lesson from that, and apply it to your own business. Whether it’s plumbing, coffee, design, legal work, the medical field, or, hell, even turning? paperclips into life size replicas of the entire 1969 winning Super Bowl team. In his talk Gary says, “if you love it you will win,” and that’s something I’ve always believed in.

Whatever it is…you started a business for a reason right? I mean, you didn’t start a business because one day you woke up and said, “I’m really good at (insert your whatever it is you want to do here), but I really don’t care about it…maybe I should go into business for myself doing that.” No. Something inspired you to shuffle off the 9-5 coil and strike out on your own. Now I’m saying this, and I am making the assumption you didn’t have a large bank roll behind you. I’m assuming you stepped out into the cold dark unknown of self employment, looked at the horizon, and smiled like a Cheshire cat. I’m assuming you looked out at whatever it is you wanted to tackle as the boss of a new business and said to yourself, “I can do this… and I want to for the rest of my life.”

You’re going to fail sometimes, but it’s that excitement for whatever it is you’ve decided to get yourself into that pulls you through to the next achievement. If you don’t have that, go back to the 9-5’er, lick your wounds, figure out what went wrong, and let someone else worry about where the monies coming from for a while.

If you’re on the fence about whether you’re excited about what you do or wherther the shine has worn off… pick a side and go there. It’s going to suck at times. It’s going to be exhausting at others. There are going to be days where you look at your loved one, friend, employee, or business partner and think, “What the hell did I get myself into?” The answer to that question is the very same thing: “I love what I do for a living!”

Chris Brogan wrote in his post: “Someone had to hunt the first mammoth. Oh, and that poor bastard died a bloody death.”

Bring me that mammoth and my rock. I’m ready to go down swinging. I’m willing to put in the hours, the time, and the effort to move forward regardless of the obstacle. I’m ready to get called crazy, loud, determined, passionate, and…a success. I am going to fail, and I look forward to it so I can get back up, dust myself off, and attack whatever knocked me down in a different direction.

I am a Small Business owner, and I’m excited to wake up every day and say that.

In Gary Vaynerchuks’s talk. he says, “if you love it you will win.” That’s something I’ve always believed in and something that, even before hearing Gary say it, has been the key to all of my successes.

Until next time…stay wicked.

* Photo courtesy of istockphoto.com

I recently had a couple of customer service experiences with my cable company, which happens to have garnered a bunch of accolades for having a strong presence on Twitter.  Okay, fine, I’ll just say it, it’s Comcast. This isn’t about Comcast, though, really — it’s just a convenient series of anecdotes on customer service in the online age.

Despite all the hype about Comcast being on Twitter, in this case, for me to go through Twitter just seemed gratuitous and superfluous. This is because I would have ended up direct messaging them with my account details, anyway, so I just e-mailed them directly at their customer support email (the one listed on their Twitter profile page).

Unless you need realtime feedback from the person having the problem, e-mail is generally more efficient than chat (text or voice), since most of your time is spent waiting for something to happen. So in this case, we see that Twitter is useful primarily for monitoring potential problems, publicly showing that you’re responding, and then directing people into a more efficient problem resolution process.

That particular issue was resolved pretty quickly — it turned out that my cable lineup had changed (like most people, the only thing I read on my bill is the number that has the dollar sign next to it), so I had to reluctantly join the ranks of digital cable subscribers.

Soon after that, though, both my broadband access and entire cable went down — I called it in, and got the recorded message that it was a known issue in my area being worked on, and was given the option to get a callback when the issue was resolved. Now, that last bit is useful, and I don’t remember having that option before, so of course I hit yes.

Not much later that evening, I got the automated call saying that the issue was repaired. Cool. I turned on my TV.

No dice.

I called the customer service folks again, and was told that the problem was still being worked on. (So why the automated all-clear call?) Then not more than two minutes later, everything came back up. So either the techs had finished up the work, or the “problem resolved” report was a few minutes out of sync with the actual fix.

This raises a point about raised expectations — you’d better deliver on them. Giving out inaccurate information in real time is as bad or worse (probably worse) than being slow, or not giving out the information in the first place. And being off by just a few minutes (or seconds, even) makes you look bad. It’s tricky.

What’s the point of all this, other than me whining about my cable? It means that even though all the individual pieces are there: Monitoring of public discussions on Twitter; e-mail support queues; having technicians in the field, CSRs on the phone, and robocallers all working off the same info — a disconnect of a few minutes will kill you. Hey, consumers are a tough crowd.

Anyway, I’m glad to see folks are trying with new tools and techniques. I think back to the bad old days, when there weren’t status Web sites or text message alerts; when a repair person couldn’t call to tell you when they were running late, or you had to spend all day camped out next to your phone. And forget about getting new phone service set up.

So, as you can see, I barely talked about Twitter. Do you have any tales of customer service with an online component that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.

QOTD-from Tactical Transparency: how leaders can leverage social media to maximize value and build their brand

Bk series intro, chapter overview
I’m still immersed in the useful insights of authors Shel Holtz and John Havens; and I can’t get enough of their book. Last week launched this review series covering the third chapter about characteristics of transparent organizations. And in light of economic times, how transparent sales strategy benefits your business seemed timely to talk about now.

QOTD-from Tactical Transparency: how leaders can leverage social media to maximize value and build their brand

Communications that interrupt your customers … are out!

Communications based in relationship-oriented marketing … are in!

So this may sound painfully obvious but I ask for your patience in saying this: being honest is the cornerstone of relationships and certainly those in a sales dynamic; yes – I appreciate those of you who may be rolling their eyes at this seemingly trite remark. But frankly how present is honesty – and the correlating transparency – in traditional sales development? Potential customers are often viewed as numbers to quench a thirsty sales quota. And after working in sales years ago, I remember some of colleagues’ approaches. What I recall most is their competition for numbers only vs a sense of service and long-term relationship building. In this chapter, Holtz and Havens specify how transparent relations emerge trust between you and your customer to ideally form a longer term opportunity to reach goals – for sales pro and customer alike.

Combining sense of service and influence: honesty is the link
The desire to actually sell someone your product is not the problem; but thrusting one-way pitches with a here-read-this-brochure insistency is. This chapter offers it all — sharing (8) tactics of transparent, relational tips to the Social Customer Manifesto, the authors discuss these concepts in a concrete, results-driven style. From making small talk more substantive with potential customers — to sharing social media ideas for two-way talks — the examples & case studies provide great context to transparent communications that can lead to trust and thus to customers more likely to see your sales professionalism as a resource.

My favorite part
…about this section is how influencing one’s customer in the spirit of serving them was addressed. It was framed as another trust building investment to seek a green light on just how much impact the sales professional can have. A featured expert describes what he asks his customers up front as they enter the sales cycle, quoting:

How heavily do you want me to influence you here?

In the context of educating the customer, I found this directness refreshing (and strategically useful). The sales executive asked permission from the customer on what degree of involvement they can engage. And it’s understood the sales exec will honor the customer’s reply, even if it delays the sales decision.

Direct. Transparent. Permission-centric. Trust-based. Service-driven…all make for fertile ground in having fruitful relationships with new and current clients.

In weeks ahead: reviewing selected chapters from Tactical Transparency

• -Ch. 16: Yeah, But…: overcoming objections;
• -Ch. 17: Your Road Map to Transparency: creating a plan
• And did you catch them? Check out thoughts via audio cast & more for the first review in this series, starting with Chapter 3: Do You Have What It Takes? Characteristics of Transparent Organizations
• …and a take down of Chapter 4: Why opaque selling doesn’t deliver long-term return on investment.

Photo Through A Glass, Darkly by Drumsnwhistles under Creative Commons License A-NC-ND Works 2.0.

Book jacket for Tactical Transparency used with permission from Meredith Stanton at John Wiley & Sons.