More Cooks in the Kitchen Can Help
Sharing information has become commonplace. As businesses and individuals, we are all competing for attention—and to get people to notice us or our product/service. While most people have heard about Facebook and Twitter, consumers who want to tell others about our business—positive or negative—can do so using dozens of other tools, from posting reviews on Google Places, to commenting on blogs or news stories, or placing information about us on a variety of other sites.
 It is increasingly important to monitor these channels for references to our businesses, products and key staff members. Monitoring competitors is also good practice. So who will do all this monitoring? There are a variety of free and paid tools that will allow you to monitor some of the activity, though we haven’t found one that tracks all activity all the time! You can set up Google Alerts to catch mentions in the news and blog posts; Twitter has a tab that shows all @mentions of your name and you can set up searches for keywords to track (you can also do this in a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite); and Facebook has just announced changes to their business pages that will send notifications when fans interact with your page. You should be using one or more of these tools to monitor the keywords and phrases that are important to you.
There are two additional things you can do to help this process. First, empower your employees. Encourage them to watch for mentions of the firm and either notify someone of positive or negative comments that should be addressed or (even better) guide them in how they can respond on behalf of the company. You may wish to have some guidelines on when and how employees should respond and when to involve management. You may also wish to have employees be involved in sharing articles, announcements of new products, or helpful tidbits for customers. Second, encourage your clients to engage with you honestly and openly using your preferred channels. Make it easy for them to share. Make sure your website and marketing literature direct consumers and prospects to your pages, provide them useful information on these sites and encourage feedback—both positive and negative. And when they do comment, acknowledge their input. If consumers know you are listening and are interested, they will interact.
Read more about online reputation management and consumer influence, read our article “Time is of the Essence”.
Facebook Business Profiles (finally!) Enhanced
 Facebook announced this month that it has added some new features to business pages within the platform. Many of us have been challenged by some of the limitations in the structure of business pages. The newest release will roll out to everyone in March, but you do have the option of upgrading your page immediately. Here are some of the new features:
• Recent photos you’ve posted will appear at the top of your page.
• Navigation links have been moved to the left to be standard with the personal pages.
• Top posts will show on your wall.
• You now have the option to use your Facebook business page to interact—including liking other pages, commenting on pages as your business (vs. the actual personal page of the administrator), and receiving notifications when fans interact with your posts.
Head out online and check it out now!
Marketing Plan Approved? Check. Lights, Camera, Action!
Back in November we discussed the importance of research and planning in developing your strategic marketing plan . Now that the plan is approved, the real work begins—implementing your marketing campaigns for 2011. Read the rest of the article for tips to help your roll-out go smoothly.
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