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Understanding Chinese Social Media

How much do you know about China and the state of social media there? Let’s put it this way, if you think that North Americans dominate social media, you’re wrong.

The first thing you need to know about Chinese Social Media is that it is big. As in, big big!  Think one billion registered users big.

China social media

Not only are these billion Chinese folks online a lot, they’re on social media a lot. Studies reveal that roughly 92% of them use some form of Chinese social media.  What kind of social media?

Well, it’s sure not Twitter! Did you know that the Chinese government actually blocks Twitter from its citizens? So you could have the world’s most savvy, popular Twitter campaign and still never reach 400 million of your potential customers.  (The same goes for Facebook, btw. The Powers That Be over there aren’t big fans of Zuckerburg’s little blue powerhouse and have blocked it too. That said, their alternative to FB is called QQ and it is incredibly popular. It’s currently got one billion registered accounts and 500 million monthly active users!)

So what elso do they use? Some of the top Chinese social media sites include douban.com and t.sina.com.cn (You can find a bigger list and more info here.) And they’re not just using one network. The average Chinese Social Mediaphile has 2.78 different accounts. And a full 50% of them actually have their own blogs! That’s 200 million plus blogs in China alone!

Starting to realize how net-savvy and available these potential customers are?

But, people in China, even though there are a lot of them, don’t have any money, so it’s impossible to actually do business with them right?

Yet another misconception dashed to pieces by the facts. Let’s take just one company, Tencent, the creators of QQ.com, instant messaging, a multi-media networking service called Qzone, and a number of SMS games.  Before I mention this, remember that Facebook is now “on their way to profitability” and that Twitter is believed to have made enough money to do better than breakeven in 2009.

Tencent, on the other hand, which trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, so is required to make regular, authoritative reports, just announced that they made $264 million in after-tax profits.

And did I mention that those profits were just from the first quarter of 2010?  And that only 13% of their revenue came from advertising (the primary source for US social networking profits)?

Yes, there’s money to be made in Chinese social media, you just have to think Chinese, learn their market, and build content that Chinese surfers want to view.

baiduBy the way – I’m saying that you should definitely pay attention to  Chinese social media. But it doesn’t end there. You should keep  your SEO eye on them as well. China’s leading search engine “Baidu” has a 75% market share in China and it’s growing by leaps and bounds every single year.  Oh and don’t neglect that mobile marketing thing either. Why? Because mobile is HOT in China.  233 million use mobile devices when they go online.

Finally, you need to know that when Chinese citizens want to travel (and 50 million of them do, each year) a full 70% of them use the internet to research their trip. Wouldn’t it be great if even a tiny percentage of that 50 million found YOU and your company?

What are you doing to capitalize on the huge Chinese social media marketplace? Share your thoughts by writing a comment below.

Filed Under: Business, Featured, Internet Marketing Strategies | Internet Marketing Training & Tips | Solutions for Internet Marketing at DonCrowther.com, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: , , ,

3 Key Ways To Protect Your Privacy on Facebook

Much has been said lately about Facebook and their cavalier approach to privacy that clearly appears to be profit-, rather than community-oriented. Other than saying that they may want to try drinking their own kool-aid and conversing rather than forcing, I’m not going to deal with that here.

What we should focus on is the outrage people feel when they realize that their online photos of last week’s keg party might be – oh I don’t know – visible to their boss? Why are folks surprised??

There’s no way to 100% safeguard your Facebook information and photos!

The only way to completely ensure that unwanted viewers can’t see your info/photos is not post them in the first place. But there are settings you can play with that make your Facebook presence more controlled and reduce the ways people can see your stuff.

Here are a few basic tips:

  1. If you don’t want your FaceBook profile visible to the public: Go to your search privacy settings page. Find the area that talks about “Search Visibility” and click on “Only friends”. Keep in mind that doing so will prevent people who might be searching for you on Facebook from finding you. But that’s a price most folks are willing to pay.
  2. If you want some friends to see your stuff…and others not to: Work those friend lists! What are friend lists? They are categories in your friend area that you can group your friends into. That way when you post your ‘nerdy’ work stuff, you can keep your bowling team from teasing you next time they see you. And more importantly, you can keep your wild n’ crazy photos from showing up on your work colleagues news feeds.
  3. If you don’t want everyone to tag you in photos they choose to post: Speaking of wild and crazy photos! Most people learn this next lesson the hard way. They log onto Facebook and get a notification that “you have been tagged in a photo!” And sometimes…. it’s not really a photo you are thrilled about. Maybe it’s unflattering or maybe it shows you in an uncompromising position, but either way – you don’t want it attached to your profile. So what to do? Easy. Go to your profile privacy page and find the setting about “Photos Tagged of You”. Now “Customize” it to show tagged photos to “only Me” or “none of my networks.” That will prevent all tagged photos from showing up to anyone but you.

There is much more you can do to your settings to ensure that your privacy is at least partially protected, but these three settings will help you gain control in a big way.

Photo Credit:

Filed Under: Facebook, Featured, Posts, Social Media How-To Tagged With: , ,

5 Ways To Get Tons of Traffic To Old Blog Posts

Blogs are a great way to show off fresh content. They attract Google spiders and readers alike with their hot-off-the-press posts. But what happens to a blog post when it’s lukewarm-off-the-press, or even a few weeks “cold?” Should you just leave it there in the archives to rot? Or are there ways to drive tons of traffic to old blog posts?

Get traffic to old blog posts

By employing just a few small tricks, you can get your blog readers to stay on your site a little longer. They can dig a little deeper and get more familiar with your brand, recommend your old posts to their friends. Basically, you can get them reading more, more, more of you, you, you!

  1. Facelift a Post: Look back at your old posts. Could any of them be re-run with just a little “refreshing up”? Drag a very old post out, dust off the cobwebs, add an introduction that makes it timely. Add images. Kill any language that ages it and then  – voila. You have a brand new post.
  2. Easter Egg Hunt: One great trick is to run an ‘Easter egg hunt’ themed contest. Quiz your readers on something they can only answer by reading your archives – and then reward those who do so with a free drawing. It could be something as simple as a $10 Starbucks card – but your readers will love the fun exercise and they’ll read a lot of your content in the meantime.
  3. Clip Show: Another way to revive old posts is to model your blog after an old sitcom formula. Do a “clip show!” Create a post that is comprised of excerpts of past posts. It can be all the most popular posts or the posts that were the most controversial or the posts that you personally loved the most. Doesn’t matter what the category is, just link back to those old posts.
  4. Related Posts: You know when you’re shopping for clothes online and underneath that photo of those snow boots is a “related item” link. Usually it’s something like a photo of the wooly socks that would go just great with those new boots? Do that with your blog posts. If you post something this week about how to make the most of a winter holiday, link to last year’s post on how to make the most of a summer holiday.  There are WordPress plugins that make creating this “Related Posts” area a snap.
  5. Email it out: Finally – don’t just rely on new people to show up on your site and have the wherewithal (or the time!) to dig through your blog archives. Instead, blast your email list a compilation of your blog post links from time to time.  Catch up the new readers with old content they may benefit from – and which they may have missed.

There are more ways, but these will provide a solid foundation. Use these five tips to reinvigorate your archives and re-excite your readers.

What other ways have you used to get more traffic to old blog posts? Share them with us by leaving a comment below.

Photo credit:

Filed Under: Business, Featured, Internet Marketing Strategies | Internet Marketing Training & Tips | Solutions for Internet Marketing at DonCrowther.com, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: , , ,

Can corporate videos go viral?

Want to go viral?

We know that videos can go viral that are about dance

and they work if you can sing like an angel

Or if your little brother keeps biting you:

But can it work for company videos?

Let me break it to you – it probably can’t if you just create a promotional commercial.

But it can, if you get creative, and can create something viral worthy. It probably won’t get 100 million plus views, but you can still get tons!

You could blend an iPad:

You could put an alarm on your Microsoft software:

yes, I know that wasn’t a Microsoft video, but it should have been!

Skittles is going to hit soon with some of theirs:

Here’s a Craftsman shot that’s got a great chance at scoring viral:

to join the success of this one:

and don’t forget this one:

So, why do these, clearly corporate videos go viral?

1. They’re cool

2. They’re unexpected

3. They’re not just purely promoting the brand, they’re promoting cool and unexpected.

So, what cool, unexpected thing can you put onto film that will build your company, brand, or image?

Know of other great viral corporate videos? Disagree with our conclusion? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

Filed Under: Business, Online Marketing Strategies | Online Marketing Solutions | Tips & Training for Online Marketing at DonCrowther.com, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com, YouTube Tagged With: , , ,

Stupid Twitter Mistakes

As a social media teacher, it’s always gratifying to see more and more small business owners using social networks to amp up their business.

They’re beginning to realize that Tweeting isn’t just for gossipy teenagers and that -in fact – a lot of their customers hang out these kinds of social media spheres all day.

So it only makes sense to stop relying solely on the ‘push’ method of marketing (oh how 2001!) and instead start to mix in the ‘pull’ methods like Tweeting and Facebooking. Small biz owners are getting that message loud and clear.

The bad news?  A lot of them are really blowing it.

In the wrong hands, social media can quickly turn on you. It can go from being a business’ smartest asset….to its hugest liability.

Bungling Twitter
One of the most famous examples of this is the story of a bumbling, tweeting intern at a big UK store called Habitat. With just a few horribly spammy Tweets they suffered an enormous online backlash and dinged their previously excellent brand in the process. (Word is, the hapless intern was let go.)

What did they do that was so bad?

Well, they plugged popular hashtags (like #iPhone and #True Blood) in their promotional tweets. Even though those hashtags had NOTHING to do with what they were saying. Or should I say – what they were selling.

This is a perfect case of what happens when that pesky “push marketing” mentality invades a very “pull” marketing arena.  Here’s a famous screencap sampling  the now infamous tweets:

Twitter Mistakes

But that’s a big store. One that has enough corporate dollars to afford traditional marketing and doesn’t need to rely on social media the way smaller business owners might.

So how are we using it? And are WE doing it right?

According to a recent study by eMarketer and the University of Maryland,  75% of small businesses had a Facebook or LinkedIn page as of December 2009. That’s great! People are ‘getting it’!

But another stat in this report isn’t quite so encouraging. Though 54% of small businesses were using social networks to ‘monitor feedback about their organizations’ and 69% were ‘posting status updates’ – a mere 16% were using Twitter as a Customer Service channel.

In other words – they were talking about themselves far more than they were listening to their customers.  Which is a cardinal sin in social media.

Listen: it’s called social media for a reason. It’s not business media. It’s social. It’s a dialogue, not a monologue. Not a sales pitch.

Do you have to answer each and every person who “@s” you in Twitter? No…but you should answer as many as you possibly can. Do you have to never mention your business and your promotions? No…but you better do so against a backdrop of lots of social, interesting talk with your customers.

Like I tell new social marketers all the time, Social Marketing may seem ‘free’…but it’s not. The same way that organic SEO isn’t really free. Sure, you don’t have to pull out your wallet and pay for it they way you do traditional advertising, but there’s a time-cost. You have to put in the time to really build relationships and be respectful and do it *right*.

Because – unlike most big businesses – you don’t have an intern to blame if you do it wrong.  You only have yourself.  So get this wrong and pay the price.  (Can’t fire yourself can you?)

But get social media right and watch your sales, your brand and your customer goodwill skyrocket.

Filed Under: Posts, Social Media How-To, Twitter Tagged With:

In the world of social media – women now rule even more!

In October 2009, in a post called In the World of Social Media, Women Rule, Brian Solis
reported that there are more women than men on most social media sites.

It’s been 6 months since then – what does the male/female ratio look like now?

To find out the answer, I recreated Brian’s data, using Google’s Ad Manager as he did, to compare apples to apples, and found that…

Women now dominate social media even more than they did 6 months ago!

Men vs Women in Social Media

And the shift is significant!

Here’s the raw data:

The Percentage Of Women On Most Social Media Sites Has Increased Significantly Over The Last 6 Months

  10/2009 10/2009 4/2010 4/2010 Unique
Site Men % Women % Men % Women % Visitors (Mil's)
Facebook 43% 57% 40% 60% 1.1 Billion
MySpace 36 64 34 66 210 Million
Twitter 43 57 40 60 150
Flickr 45 55 45 55 110
YouTube 50 50 50 50 82
hi5 46 54 43 57 50
Ning 41 59 36 64 37
Tagged 36 64 36 64 28
digg 64 36 57 43 25
Yelp 43 57 40 60 23
Classmates 36 64 34 66 19
Docstoc 41 59 38 62 16
Bebo 32 68 34 66 15
ustream 34 66 48 52 13
Del.icio.us 48 52 45 55 8.2
friendfeed 45 55 43 57 3.8
foursquare     43 57 3.5

I find it interesting that:

  • In almost every case, the percentage of women visiting each site increased over the last 6 months.
    This raises the question: are women being drawn to these sites even more heavily than they were before, OR are men not finding what they want on these sites and frequenting them less often?
    Note: this data comes from people actually visiting the sites, as measured by Google. So, the numbers probably can’t be explained as sploggers using women’s names and risque pictures in their profiles. This data should be fairly clean.
  • The sites where the percentage of visitors either increased or remained flat were ustream, YouTube, Flickr and Bebo. Could it be that men are more attracted to watching video and viewing pictures online than women, so these sites are better filling their needs?
    And no, I’m clueless about the Bebo shift.
  • I included the unique visitors (as measured by Google as estimated cookies) to show the differences in impact across the sites.

What can marketers learn from this data?

  • The impact of women is rapidly growing in social media. Why, we can only guess (and I’d love to hear your guesses in the comments below.) If you market to women or have a product where women are the decision makers/gatekeepers, you need to have an active, participatory presence in social media.
  • How you interact on social media is also vital. Women are more active on a daily basis; actively publish, post to and read blogs, and are more likely to make purchase decisions based on blogs and social media recommendations (source: blogher study.) They also tend to be more interactive, and less likely to respond to “brochure-ware” sites and non-interactive social media placeholders.
  • If you market to men, you may want to consider revising your approach to better meet the needs of your audience. Video should definitely play a role.

What else can we learn from this data? How do you explain this shift? What will you do differently as a result? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Filed Under: Business, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: , , , ,

Customer Service Through Social Media

Any student of social media has heard of the debates and the successes several companies have enjoyed by opening up their customer service department to respond to customer gripes via social media.

And, they’ve heard of the failures.
Customer Service Through Social Media
In the end, the verdict is coming down that yes, you should be having a customer service presence on social media. But as you do so, remember that social media, though it has significant advantages (especially in light of telling the world that you actually DO customer service,) it is far from the ideal, complete solution.

Case in point. I just spent 3 hours dealing with the team at Norton (Symantec: SYMC) trying to figure out how to allow my computers to actually see each other on the network. Of course, as a mini-geek, I’ve already tried all the standard stuff, so by the time I contact tech support, it’s because it’s a serious issue.

(Norton could learn from frequent reference to Don’s Law #14: “Anything that requires directions is an insufficiently developed technology.”)

Ann, my fearless customer support professional, after 2.5 hours, actually pulled it off and everything worked! Then we turned to my minor second issue.

This time Ann really blew it. Instead of actually doing what I asked her to do 3 times, and looking at the logs, where the error statement was clearly listed, Ann decided to blow away the backup set that had taken me two weeks to create and start a new one. So now, instead of having a problem fixed, I have to wait another 2 weeks to arrive where I started from, and I’m almost certain to have to contact them again to resolve the problem once it recurs. What’s worse, she did it all without asking my permission.

As you can imagine, our little chat quickly twisted from delight to let’s just say, less than thrilled.

I was testing her to see what would happen, and Norton actually got it. Out of the blue in the middle of my online chat, my phone rang, with her supervisor wanting to talk instead of handle the issue through chat. And while he didn’t do what he should have done (read: give me something free,) he did quickly and effectively defuse the situation.

As I reflected upon that, I saw the wisdom in what he did, and I agree with his tactics.

Key learning – social media and online tools work great for certain things, but when emotions get high, get on the phone and get it resolved!

Remember that as you set up your company’s social media-based customer service functions!

How has social media customer service worked for you? What do you find to be best practices? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

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Free social media tracking!

There are many companies that track your brand, company and name through social media, but most of them are quite costly. However there’s one site that gives you a pretty good indication of how you’re doing, and it comes at my favorite price: free!

Free Social Media Tracking
It’s called socialmention.com

SocialMention.com allows you to search on anything,a brand name, a company name, your name, or your site, and see social mentions of it from 80+ social media properties including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.

In response to that search you get a linked summary of the search, and 4 other measurements:

  • Strength: the likelihood that your brand or topic is being discussed in social media. It does this by calculating the total number of mentions of your searched terms within the last 24 hours divided by the total possible mentions.
  • Sentiment: the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative. They remove neutral statements from the equation.
  • Passion: measures the likelihood that people who are talking about your term are doing so repeatedly. So, if many of your users talk about your term several times, your score will be higher than if they only mention your term once.
  • Reach: the number of unique authors that mention your search term divided by the total number of mentions.

Here’s an example search on Tiger Woods. At the moment, he’s got pretty good strength at 24% and amazing reach at 25%. However his sentiment is 3:1, so he’s getting only 3 positive comments for every negative one. He does have good passion at 34%. Unfortunately, when you look at passion in relation to sentiment, it’s likely that passion could be significantly negative. (Wish there was some kind of cross tab option here – positive passion, negative passion and netural passion would be nice!)
social media mentions Tiger Woods

By scrolling down, you can see the numbers of people used to calculate the sentiment factor, top keywords associated with your term in the last 24 hours (valuable!), top users, top hashtags used in posts referencing your term, and the sites where your term is mentioned. You can also download these numbers in CSV format from the right side of the page.

Remember that, though you can see how many total mentions there are in the center column, the left column only reflects the past 24 hours. So, these numbers will vary widely, depending on what the public is saying about you on any given day. This variability is both good and bad – good because you get the ability to quickly read swings in perception. Bad, because you do not have the option to request them from a different/longer time period.

You also have the option, from the links at the top, to focus into certain types of media.

How to use socialmention.com

I recommend that you:

  • Sign up for daily alerts on your term, enabling you to track changes from day to day. (See the alert button at the bottom of the page.)
  • Track your site and your blog separately
  • Add it to your firefox search dropdown box, so it’s easy to access at any time (Again, it’s at the bottom of the page – Install Search Plugin)
  • Track yourself, your competition, your category, and your brands
  • Install and use the realtime buzz widget on your your blog or site. (Currently on the homepage.)

Conclusion: cool tool, right price, certainly gives you an indication of where you are without buying reports from the more high-priced services.

I recommend it!

What do you use to track your social media online? Do you find socialmention.com helpful? What else would you like to see? Tell us about it by posting a comment below.

Filed Under: Business, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: , , , ,

How to track Twitter links to any site

Have you ever wished there was an easy way to see and track all Twitter links that point to your (or to any other) site? You could go to search.twitter.com, but the only links that would appear there are ones that don’t use a URL shortener (as you know, the vast majority of links do.) So you’re getting a very incomplete picture.

There’s a solution to that, and it’s free!

how to track twitter links to your site using backtweets.com

It’s called backtweets.com.

Simply input the URL for your site, hit search, and you immediately get back tweets that have linked to your site. Scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see the total number of links recorded.
backtweets.com results

Try it right now. How’s your company doing?

That’s great, but now let’s take this to another level.

1. Besides searching on your site overall, you can also search for specific pages on your site by putting in the URL of that particular page.
Play around with your results for a minute, searching on the pages that appear most frequently in your overall site’s result. You’ll probably find that a few pages represent the vast majority of all of your links (Pareto was a genius.) All kinds of analysis flows from that – what’s the commonality between those successful pages? What’s the commonality between those that aren’t getting the links? What plan can you implement to build the linking on pages that aren’t doing well.

2. Using the Advanced Search function, you can focus the search on certain dates.
That can be helpful when looking at the result from specific posts.

3. Create an RSS feed of your results
Use it to track your results on a regular basis through your favorite feed reader

backtweets.com rss feed

4. Pull the RSS feed you created into your blog, to let visitors know that others are linking to your blog posts

5. Benchmark yourself against other key sites in your marketplace
Do a generic search for your site and your competitors and track the results on a spreadsheet. You probably will want to do a date-limited advance search for this, to compare apples to apples.

6. Try clicking on the Conversations link to see all conversations relating to your search happening on blogs and other social media.
This doesn’t work with every category I’ve tested, but in some categories it can be very valuable.

7. Sign up for email alerts to get a daily or weekly record of how you’re doing.
You can receive alerts as they occur, I wouldn’t recommend that unless you’re rarely tweeted (shame on you if you are!.)

In short, backtweets can be a quick and easy way to track your exposure in the Twittersphere. I recommend it!

What other uses did I miss? What tools do you use to track your social media exposure? Tell us about them by posting a comment below!

Filed Under: Business, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

The odd relationship between hunting night crawlers and social media

You haven’t lived yet until you’ve hunted night crawlers.

Never hunted night crawlers? Here’s how to do it:

night crawler hunting and social media

Requirements:
1 Warm summer evening
1 lawn (owned, rented or borrowed)
1 or more 8-12 year old kids eager to catch some crawlers tonight and some huge trout tomorrow
Firm plans to actually go fishing tomorrow (never disappoint a young fisherman!)
1 flashlight for each hunter
Several buckets to put the crawlers into once caught
A spirit of laughter and adventure

Step 1: Water your lawn
Correction, soak your lawn.You can’t just water it. You have to drown it, for several hours. You’re trying to flood the little night crawler tunnels so they’ll come to the surface.

Step 2: Wait until nightfall.
Not dusk, real nightfall. Think dark.

Step 3: Turn off your sprinklers
This step seems to make for happier hunters

Step 4: Do some serious hunting
This is where you get stealthy. Night crawlers can feel vibrations in the ground and can hear noises (at least that’s what I was taught.) So you’ve got to be sneaky to succeed.

Shine your flashlights across the lawn. Look for little brown nightcrawlerish-looking bodies lying on the ground. Be aware, however, that by light of flashlight, many things, like small sticks, toys, and doggy dodos take on the appearance of night crawlers, so be careful what you grab.

When you see one, carefully creep up on it. Bend over really slowly, then grab it fast.

Yes, you have to be fast, because the favorite position of a night crawler whose home is temporarily flooded out is halfway out of its hole, keeping its tail (you do know that night crawlers have tails, right?) in its hole in case someone successfully sneaks up on it and tries to grab it. And not only is its tail in the hole, but it expands the end of its tail to anchor it in the hole and stretches its body out extra far to allow for…

When it senses danger, the night crawler uses its tail anchor as leverage and sucks its body back into the hole, in a fraction of a second. So you’ve got to be fast, really fast.

You’re going to miss the first 5 or so you try, but once you get your hands around your first night crawler, the real battle begins. The crawler’s tail anchor is tenacious, and he’s not about to release it just so the he can become trout-bait. Basically what happens is a tug of war – you pull, he pulls back, and it keeps going like that until he either slips out of your hand, you pull him out of the hole, or he breaks in half. That’s why it’s such a great adventure, and why its almost a must to have a few 8-12 year olds around just to watch their faces the first time they actually win the battle and place a whole crawler into the bucket! They won, it was a hard-fought, slimy battle, but they won, and their faces will show it! (Remember they can’t shout, or you’ll lose your entire night of hunting!)

Continue until you’ve got enough to catch a full creel of trout the next day, plus a couple of buckets more for the kids to sell to other anglers on the banks – which makes for great (and essential) sales training for a 10-year old!

Why this exhaustive write up about night crawlers? Because the process of hunting crawlers is a great example of what not to do when hunting customers.

Many people pursue online marketing in a way that reminds me a great deal of night crawler hunting. They carefully flood the environment where their customers hang out, basically drowning them into revealing themselves. They they sneak up on them, grab them and start a tug of war, basically brow-beating their customers into buying.

Yes, a few do end up in the proverbial bucket. But why would you ever want to create a marketing plan based on cajoling unwilling customers into buying? Wouldn’t you rather have a situation where they willingly come, practically begging you to sell them something?

That’s part of what social media does. When properly done, it helps you create a relationship of trust and familiarity with your customers. At that point they’re less like night crawlers, dug into their lairs and holding on (and holding onto their wallets) for dear life, and more like a puppy, eager to learn a trick so he can be rewarded with another dog biscuit and an enthusiastic pat on the head.

What kind of seller are you? What kind do you want to be?

Social media’s your answer!

Like this analogy? Hate it? Know a trick to crawler hunting that I don’t know about? Share it by making a comment below.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peculiarmomma/508391174/

Filed Under: Business, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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