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Why More Businesses Should Be Using Instagram

by Jonathan Barrick

An Instagram picture is worth way more than a thousand words. Why not let them speak for your business?

Instagram is a ridiculously easy to use photo sharing service. If you’re not familiar with the app, it essentially allows you to snap a photo using your iPhone camera (or choose one from your existing photo library), crop it, tilt-shift it (fancy word for ‘blur’), and ‘stylize’ it using a variety of pre-set photo filters. You can then publish your creation directly to your choice of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a few other social networks.

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Before and After shots of a baseball diamond, taken with Instagram

Instagram has grown to over 7 million users in the short time it’s been in existence, and it continues to grow due to it’s simplicity, and how easy it is for anyone with an iPhone to become instantly artistic with any photo.

You might be wondering just what this might have to do with business. Well, images are a crucial piece of your business’ story. No matter the product, no matter the service, without pictures all you’re left with is a giant block of text that no one wants to read.

It’s been proven that photos and video are some of the most shared kinds of content on social networks, and it’s easy to understand why. We gravitate towards images naturally. it’s much easier and faster for us to process the message in a picture, and it’s also much easier to evoke emotion through images.

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Picture frames, taken at a local art supply store, and Copper tubes, taken at Home Depot

One of the main reasons I’m suggesting using Instagram for your business photo sharing instead of, say, Flickr, is that Instagram allows you to give otherwise bland photos a bit of personality. It allows you to transform the ‘feel’ of a picture in order to convey the desired emotions. But, enough of the touchy-feely stuff. I’m sure you’d like to hear some examples of how businesses can use this service in the real-world.

Here are those examples:

  1. Salons – Allows you to share stylized photos of hairstyles, manicure/pedicure nail art, makeup, and even shots of the salon itself. This will allow you to showcase your skills, as well as the decor and environment in your salon to reinforce your brand.
  2. Automotive Collision Repair Shop – Great for showcasing custom paint jobs, or illustrating ‘Before’ and ‘After’ shots of mangled cars. Also would allow your customers a behind-the-scenes look at body repair, painting, and detailing. Convey the level of skill that is required to turn a wrecked car back in to a thing of beauty.
  3. Coffee House – This one is easy. Pics of people laughing, chatting, working in your shop. Showcase your funky ‘latte foam art’ or displays of mugs and beans. Show your customers the kind of friendly environment they can expect when they walk in to your shop.

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    Pics taken at a local coffee shop with Instagram

  4. Golf Course – If you don’t see the inherent beauty in a golf course, I don’t know what to tell you. You can post great shots of the landscaping, sunrises and sunsets over the greens, actions shots of golfers on the tee, and highlight tournaments and other events. Any kind of recreational business is a prime candidate for creative photo sharing.

This list could go on, and on, and on, but I think you get the point. It doesn’t matter what business you have, there is always SOMETHING artistic in it somewhere. Allowing other people to see what is already there can give them a completely different perspective on what it is you do. Something that is seemingly mundane and commonplace can instantly be given a totally different ‘feel’ through creative imaging. It never hurts to infuse your business with a little more personality, and Instagram makes it easy for anyone to do so.

*This entry was originally posted on Crowdshifter.com

A Different Kind of Influencer – Find Your Enthusiasts

I have a really hard time putting any kind of stock in to a Klout score. It just seems extremely artificial to me. After all, a quick look at those with scores of 100 yields an awful lot of pop music personalities, whom I shall not name because they clearly do not need any additional referrals. Klout strongly believes that these individuals hold a massive amount of influence, but the question remains: What are they influencing people to do? Retweet their stuff? Buy their song on iTunes? Big deal. Above and beyond that, the real influence of celebrities doesn’t really amount to too much.

One can easily argue that individuals who are ‘experts’ on a particular topic have far more actual influence than celebrities, because they often post blog articles and advice that people will put in to practice, thereby changing the behaviour of their audience based on the information that they share. If they share a review of a web design technique that works, or tips for communicating in the social media world, many followers will heed their advice and put those tips in to play for themselves. This, in my opinion, is a much more accurate description of ‘influence’.

But there’s a third group of people who hold ‘influence’ in the digital world. They’re not celebrities. They’re not experts. They are what I call the ‘enthusiasts’. People who are absolutely nuts for whatever it is they are talking about. They live it and breathe it. Whatever it is, it is their passion. It could be cars, PC’s, flowers, web design, photography, woodworking, travel, or antique toys. Everyone is passionate about something, and everything has someone who is passionate about it.

These individuals are a new kind of influencer. Finding these individuals and engaging with them can create a brand advocate of far greater strength and loyalty than any well-known expert. After all, if a popular expert endorses a product or service, there is a good chance that there is some mutual benefit coming back to them from that company. Either they got the product for free, or were paid to do a review, or simply got the benefit of being featured on the company’s website. Not to say this is bad, because most popular experts got to where they are by being good at what they do. They evaluate products and services very methodically, and tend to have broader experiences to draw comparisons from. But an enthusiast? They probably paid for whatever it is out of their own pocket.

There’s something to be said for having super-passionate enthusiasts interacting with you, sharing their opinions and reviews, and becoming your best friends. Social media amplifies their voices and creates a whole new level of word-of-mouth. Someone with 200 followers who’s crazy about your company tweeting about your stuff for weeks (or months) on end can have far more reach and influence than a single tweet in the daily stream of an expert to an audience of 30,000.

Ultimately, if you are carefully checking Klout scores and looking at follower counts in order to determine if mentioning or responding to a specific individual is ‘worth your time’, you may be missing out on a huge untapped resource of ‘influence’. Every single person who mentions you is worth your time. You never know who’s voice will really carry the farthest in the social media world.

4 Simple Tips for Integrating Print & Social Media – Making it Easy

by Jonathan Barrick

When it comes to listing your social media contact info on your brochure, do you simply say ‘Find us on Facebook’? You’d better hope your customers are very patient while they comb through 500 million users.

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We see Facebook and Twitter icons and logos all over the place now. They are very nearly as common place in advertising as phone numbers and email addresses, but what I’ve noticed is that a large number of companies stop short with JUST the logo of the Social Media site that they participate in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do anything to help the user actually find you on those sites. Since the search functions on Social Media sites can pull up dozens of suggestions for any business name or search term, simply putting the logo of the site somewhere on your brochure can be counter-productive.

Businesses must realize that by doing this, they’re essentially saying “If you go on this site of 500 million users, I’m in there somewhere.” Not to mention the added level of complexity that exists if your business is a single location in a chain. What if there are 5 or 6 different stores from the same chain on Facebook? How easy is it for your users to identify which one is yours? What if corporate head office is listed there, too?

You can see the problem that this presents when you take the time and effort to connect with your customers, but you don’t go those last few steps to ensure that it’s really you that they find when they go looking. Luckily, there are a few simple things you can do to make yourself easier to connect with.

1 – Use a custom URL, and minimize it.

Most social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, will allow you to customize your URL so that you can shorten it and make it easier to fit on to brochures and business cards. For example, you can easily go from something like this page I found:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ford-Dealership/109108405778479

to a much cleaner example from another page:

http://www.facebook.com/ford.sales

Another tip to minimize the text is to simply remove the ‘http://’ from the URL, since we are all so used to seeing web addresses, it’s hardly a stretch to realize that ‘facebook.com/ford.sales’ should be typed in to the URL bar of a web browser.

To create a customized URL on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/username/

With Twitter, you can follow two ways of approaching this. You can either list your Twitter username: in my case @j_barrick, or your direct URL to your tweets: http://twitter.com/j_barrick. Again, you can use the simplistic: twitter.com/j_barrick and make the URL even cleaner and still make no mistake of which Twitter user is the real deal.

2 – Stick with only your top sites.

You may be tempted to list every single location online where your users can find you, but once you get past Facebook and Twitter, the widespread user base drops off dramatically. You might have a Flickr page, or Tumblr blog, or Myspace page, or several others from the myriad collection of social media sites, but that doesn’t mean you should stuff your materials full of every possible site. As a general rule of thumb, just list the few key sites that you’re most active on, or that you have the largest community. Again, this is all about making it easy on the reader.

3 – Don’t forget your main web address.

Unless you’ve got a VERY specific reason for doing this, don’t leave your regular www. web address off of any of your materials. I’ve seen several instances of companies running ads that are designed solely to drive traffic to their Facebook pages, but unless you’re running a completely dedicated campaign with Facebook traffic as your ultimate objective, this may not be the best course of action.

After all, your website should be the main hub of all your activity. Users should be able to go anywhere you are online from your website, so that would be where you’d list all the ‘other’ locations we talked about back in Tip #2, so don’t miss out on an opportunity to  get people to visit your main online home. It can encourage them to check out more of you in other locations.

4 – Avoid ‘stylized’ logos. Stick with the instantly recognizable ones.

If you have picked up a magazine or newspaper in the last 12 months, then you know what the Twitter logo looks like. Same for Facebook. The simple, clean but easily identifiable ‘T’ and ‘F’ icon logos in the official colours are unquestionable about what they represent. But if you start to incorporate ‘fancier’ ones, (maybe they look like stamps, or buttons, or shiny metal), then you run a much greater risk of the general populace not recognizing them.

Example:

Use logos like this: image not like this: image in print materials.

The goal here is to ultimately drive people to see what you’re doing on these sites. If they can’t make that immediate association to the social media site brands that they are familiar with, they will be less likely to make that effort.

Bonus Tip: Business Cards

Your business card had better already have your company web address on it, but why not add your Facebook or Twitter URL as well? It’s simply one more way for your users to connect with you, which is the entire purpose of the business card to begin with! This info belongs on your cards, so the next time you print a batch, make that addition.

So overall, I think you can see that simply throwing an icon on your print materials doesn’t really accomplish anything other than ‘Yeah, we’re on Twitter’. If you really want to encourage people to check you out, then you need to make it as easy as possible. You would never put ‘Find us on the Web!‘ without listing your web address, so why do that with your Social Media?

End Note: There is another technology being introduced that intends to do a better job of integrating print and web, and that is the QR code. I haven’t touched on that in this article for two reasons: 1 – It’s a bit more advanced in terms of it’s usage and how to integrate it in to your business goals, and this article was intended as the ‘basics’ of putting SM contact info in to print, and 2 – it is still in the early adoption stage, and until every person has a smartphone, and everyone has taken the time to download a QR code reader app for their smartphone, QR codes will continue to be a very specialized way to reach a unique target market. In summary, not enough people know what they are or have the understanding and technology to utilize them effectively.

Twitter + TV = Better Entertainment

Jeff Probst and CBS get Twitter in a way that very few do.


Image linked from: http://mikesbloggityblog.com


I’m a big Survivor fan. Been watching since my wife (then girlfriend) convinced me to watch the finale of the Australia season (#2). Seen every episode of every season since then, and it never gets old.

That being said, this season (#21 if you’re keeping track) has added a completely new element to the experience of watching this show: Jeff Probst, the long-serving and exceptionally entertaining host of the show, live-Tweets with fans during the show.

For the past few episodes, he’s done this, and it’s added a new layer of insight in to what is the longest running ‘reality show’ in history. Imagine if you could sit on the couch right next to the director of your favourite movie AS you’re watching it. Yeah, it’s THAT cool.

For example, tonight I found out that Jeff gets to keep the torch-snuffers from each season, he accidentally smashed a vote urn during a lighting rehearsal, and that he thinks Ralph telling everyone about the hidden idol was a huge mistake. Now granted, if you’re not a fan you’re probably saying “So what?”. But if you ARE a fan, you know how interesting these little bits of info are. Now you’ll likely start thinking about other shows that you watch, and what little bits of info the host or actors might have that you might find really interesting. See how this adds a new level of entertainment to the whole ‘TV’ experience?

What Jeff Probst and CBS have done is recognize the potential for connecting with their already-loyal fans and making them feel like they’re very nearly part of the show. Which, of course, they are. Without fans a show doesn’t get past the first season. By having a host who clearly loves what he does, and allowing him to connect with the fans of the show while it airs, they’re allowing the ‘Survivor’ experience to be enhanced by having ‘behind-the-scenes’ comments sent out in real-time to everyone who wants to know more about the show. This kind of bonus material is usually reserved for ‘special edition’ DVD’s or two-hour post-season specials. Now you get it instantaneously, and for free.

What this clearly illustrates is the passion that both Jeff and CBS have for the show, which in turn will take already devoted fans and turn them in to raving evangelists. They recognize that by engaging with their fans they increase the amount of entertainment that they can jam in to a TV show’s time slot.

Businesses can learn something from this example. Sure, social media is great at improving your SEO, generating brand awareness, and all those other good things. But what social media is EXCEPTIONAL at is taking an already strong relationship with your biggest fans and making that relationship essentially indestructible. If you give your advocates and enthusiasts more than they expect, they will sing your praises even louder than they already do. Just something to think about.

4 Guaranteed Ways to Tragically Fail at Social Media Marketing

How several small bad decisions can lead to tremendous failure.

After reading it once already, I recently started skimming back through “How to Lose a Battle”, a collection of epic military failures gathered and edited by Bill Fawcett. I came to the chapter relating to the Battle of Agincourt, in which Henry V succeeded in producing one of the most lopsided victories in military history. After many weeks of exhaustive fighting had whittled his already relatively small force down to approx 17,000 soldiers and archers, Henry’s army still managed to decimate a well-rested, well-equipped force of 60,000+ French Knights. How did this happen? Well, the simple summary is that the French general did everything possible to lose the battle. There are many parallels that can be drawn from the details of the disaster and applied to marketing in social media, and I’ve pulled the 4 most prominent of those to explain how you can easily produce a tremendous failure in the world of social media marketing:

#1 – Wait until the time is wrong.
    Henry’s forces landed on the shores of France 30,000 strong. They first laid siege to the port city of Harfleur, at which time the French Army could have simply marched up and sandwiched Henry’s forces between the French ground forces and the city, forcing the English to be attacked from two sides. But the French waited, and waited, and waited until every noble knight could be gathered in Paris. In short, they failed to recognize the urgency and left Harfleur to defend itself, without the support of the main French forces, and as a result the city soon fell to the English. After the city fell, Henry V left a small contingent in the city as a garrison, sent the sick and wounded back to England, and marched on with a force approx 20,000 strong, continuing his attacks against other French cities.

What to take away from that: When marketing in Social Media, don’t ignore small problems that can grow in to major problems. Any hint of customer dissatisfaction that goes unaddressed, any positive comment that goes unthanked, any question that goes unanswered simply gives your competition more opportunities to serve your customers in a better way. If something (ANYTHING) happens, be the first to have a presence in the discussion. Those seemingly ‘small’ issues can be the precursor to ‘large’ issues that are decidedly more difficult to manage later in their life cycle.

#2 – Say ‘no, thank you’ to valuable tools and resources.
    While gathering their forces in Paris, a group of 6,000 militia crossbowmen offered their services to the French general. They were promptly told ‘No, thank you, we’ve got this under control.’, and were sent on their way. The French army viewed them as ‘low-rent’ soldiers, hardly worth using in a real war.

What to take away from that: Free help? One more tool in your toolbox that you can call on when necessary? Always take it. If you want to learn about your customers or competition, you don’t just use one channel, you use all of them. See what’s being said on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and any other place you can find info and participate in each of them. Don’t ignore any of your available options for learning.

#3 – Be ‘too good’ to use certain tools.
    The traditional hierarchy of fighting forces was extremely ingrained in the social castes of the time. For example, it was generally accepted that a well-trained knight was a much more valuable and effective fighter than a peasant archer, even though that peasant archer could easily take out dozens of knights at a distance without breaking a sweat. That didn’t matter. What did matter was that archers were poor, lower class citizens, and knights were the elite. They decided the knights would be first in line, and the archers fell in behind them, essentially making it impossible for them to do their jobs. Oddly, archers were the most-feared part of the English army by the French, and yet were not viewed as a crucial part of the French assault force.

What to take away from that: Recognize the inherent advantages in each available tool, and use each of them to maximum effect. Twitter is different from Facebook is different from LinkedIn, etc. Trying to put all your emphasis on one channel and saying the others are just ‘not for you’ is a big mistake. Making assumptions about the options available to you without all the facts can be crippling. You can use each of them for different effects, each of which has an inherent value. Sometimes you don’t know just how far-reaching the effects can be until you try.

#4 – Disregard the basic environmental conditions.
    The ground was wet on the battlefield that day. Previous engagements with English archers had led the French to learn how devastating they can be to mounted knights, due to the lack of protection on the horses. The French general made the decision to have his army dismount and attack on foot, slowing their approach considerably, and quickly turning the wet ground to a greasy slop under the weight of thousands of heavily armoured French soldiers.

What to take away from that: Be aware of the current environment. Paying attention to how people talk, what makes them move towards you and what makes them run away. What kinds of things are impacting their opinions? The influencing factors aren’t always directly linked to your company or your competitor, but can be something as intangible as market attitudes or external economic factors. Being aware of the basic market conditions is essential to communicating effectively on what matters to your audience in the here-and-now.

So, as you can see, by simply ignoring problems, ignoring available tools, and ignoring basic environmental conditions, you too can have a social media failure as symbolically tremendous as the French loss at Agincourt. Although, by doing the exact opposite of that, you might find yourself on the other side of the spectrum. Of course, hindsight allows us to easily criticize but the reality is that each of those individual effects may have not been so tragic on their own, but when you combine them one after the other, they create the perfect storm of failure. The trick is to prevent those individual effects from occurring, so that the major disasters simply can’t form. Easier said than done, but by staying vigilant and learning from others mistakes, I believe it’s achievable.

What are your thoughts? Have you heard of any social media or marketing experiences where one bad decision after another led to a failure of epic proportions?

The Tao of Twitter – Book Review

The book I wish I had before I wrote my first Tweet.

Twitter can be a really hard sell sometimes. “Who wants to hear what celebrities had for lunch?”, “You can’t use something like Twitter for business.”, or “How can you say anything worthwhile in 140 characters?” are all questions that we’ve heard before, and some of us are even guilty of asking them. But the reality is far from this perception. Twitter is indeed a viable platform for business communication, professional networking, customer service, marketing, news, and more. Every day more and more people are realizing the positives from participating on Twitter. They are preaching its awesomeness from all corners of the globe, and yet there are still droves of people who still think it’s stupid, pointless, just for kids, or full of celebrity gossip.

So how do you break that stereotype and show them the reality? Well, Mark W. Schaefer, author of the {grow} blog, took action and wrote The Tao of Twitter. A book whose sole purpose is to smash the negative stereotypes that talk of Twitter as a ‘waste of time’, and show readers that the personal and business benefits you can achieve on Twitter are real and are far-reaching.

Rather than start off with the typical lists of terminology and mechanics, Mark begins the book with a funny little anecdote about when he had his ‘a-ha!’ moment on Twitter. A moment that we all have when we start using it. The precise moment when you realize what the potential is. He then moves to an example of a tangible business success that could only have come to him as a result of Twitter. This approach allows the reader to understand the whole point of Twitter in the first 10 pages, and see what it’s capable of, instead of getting immediately bogged down with dry definitions and acronyms.

From there, Schaefer proceeds to explain the three ‘Tao’s that ensure you’re developing a strong community. In summary, the keys are to ensure you follow a group of people that are providing good content, that you return the favour and share good content to your followers, and that you commit to being genuinely helpful to the community. Through these three activities you will begin to realize the full benefits of Twitter.

Only then, once he’s shown that YES it does work for business, does Schaefer begin to explain some of the essential common terminology, the basic mechanics of how to Tweet properly, and some of the best do’s/don’ts for both beginners and veterans alike. Mark also outlines a simple regimen for ensuring that your entire day is not devoured by Twitter, but you are still an active participant within your community.

Finally, the book discusses how to put all the concepts together, as well as some important competitive advantages that will come from using Twitter, and how some of the current influence benchmarks work and are being used. While far from perfect, these influence metrics are still important to be aware of, and you certainly won’t be able to ignore them for long.

Overall, I was quite impressed by this first book by Mark W. Schaefer. It tackles a key problem that businesses face when adopting Social Media, and uses real examples of successes, both personal and professional. The Tao of Twitter should be viewed as the handbook to become one of those Twitter users that people will actually WANT to follow. It’s the kind of book that you’ll read more than once, lend to your friends and colleagues, and will probably fill with post-it notes, highlighter marks, and dog-eared pages.

*NOTE: This review was not solicited in any way. My copy of the Tao of Twitter was purchased.

Being the student & the teacher – Participation in Social Media.

Being involved in Social Media is to be a perpetual student who is also teaching the class.

I stumbled across an old proverb today: “By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn.” I’ve come to realize that never has this been more evident than in the world of Social Media. We now find ourselves participating in one big, continuous learning environment, with access to the most brilliant minds in whatever field you happen to be in. It’s like living inside the best convention/event/conference that you’ve ever seen, 24/7/365. It’s never been easier to learn from others, and to have others learn from you.

Social Media is an incredible tool for exchanging information. It allows you to connect with others who operate from a similar mindset to your own, but a big part of the power is that it allows you to connect with those whose brains use a completely different operating manual. This is often where the most inspirational ideas come from. I may not like the same music or foods as you, but that has nothing to do with your ability to generate an idea that blows my mind. Connecting with people of all different mindsets allows you to grab the best of all perspectives, and use it to form a completely new approach that you would never have been able to obtain before.

But lets also think about your ability to teach others using Social Media. Just because you don’t have 10,000 followers doesn’t mean that you’re not capable of providing valuable information to others. Think about it in a simple example like this: the internet is a huge place, with millions and millions of new pieces of content added daily. There’s no way that one person, or even a group of people, can find all the gold that exists. Everyone has to do their part to find the hidden nuggets of awesome that can be shared with the community. If you find even one piece of gold that may have been missed otherwise, then you’ve done your part. Share the wealth of knowledge that you find, and you’ve become both the teacher and the student.

Even the ‘learned masters’ in the Social Media world are constantly searching out new material and information from the community. The reason they are so successful in these new channels is not because they are the single brilliant mind that everyone yearns to become, but because they are constantly learning from others. What works, what doesn’t work. They take the info, digest it, process it, tweak it, apply it, and test it. Repeat. This is how the smart get smarter. No one person has all the answers, but when we all come together, the collective does.

This is where the learning power of Social Media lies. The ability to create, the ability to discover, and the ability to share. Only by doing all three are you able to maximize your learning through these communities. As a result, we all become better. We all become more knowledgeable, more effective, and more successful.

Changing Your Tone – Talking in Social Media

It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it.


For many, many years, the marketing and advertising teams out in the world had a very distinctive way of ‘talking’ in the materials they produced. This way of talking even has a name: “Ad-speak”. I’m sure that you don’t even need me to describe it to you, but it was always loaded with punchy, trendy words, phrases like ‘never before seen!’ and ‘for a limited time!’, and gave you the impression that the people who wrote it thought they were doing you a favour by telling you how lucky you were to now know about this amazing product.

The thing is, every product had that kind of pitch. Sure, some were more eloquently written than others, but ultimately their goal was to convince you that whatever it was that you were looking at was a better choice than all the others. Here’s an example: Do you know how many different ads for pickup trucks claim that they have the ‘most horsepower’, ‘most torque’, ‘biggest towing capacity’? All of them. And for some reason, they all seem to have won a ‘Truck of the Year’ award. Not sure how that works, but maybe ‘Truck of the Year’ awards are like the ‘participant’ ribbons you used to get at your public school science fairs. Everybody gets one just for showing up.

But does this really make a difference anymore? We see study after study being done that reveals the lessening effects of print and television advertising in swaying opinions. People just don’t give those types of messages any kind of credibility anymore, because they all sound exactly the same. So how do you turn off decades of habitual ‘ad-speak’ and switch it to something that doesn’t make people tune out? Start working in Social Media, that’s how.

Take a look at some of the companies that are successful in Social Media, and look at the way they write their content. When they tweet, when they update on Facebook, or post on their blog. How does it sound? Does it read like an ad? Or does it read like someone talking to you in a casual setting? I’d be willing to wager something marginally valuable that they aren’t shouting slogans at you, are they?

Social Media is all about starting conversations that go both ways. An ad on TV is one-way communication. An ad in a magazine is one-way communication. But a piece of content put out in Social Media is ∞-way communication. Anyone can post on your Facebook wall, anyone can reply, and anyone can reply to anyone’s reply. A single tweet can spread to hundreds of thousands of people, if it’s something that your followers care about. A blog post can generate insightful comments and valuable feedback, if people care about what you wrote.

The key is to keep your readers/followers comfortable. Keep them at ease when they’re connecting with you. Make them feel like you’re not just shouting at them, but actually talking as if they were sitting next to you in a coffee shop, or over a beer at the end of a long day.

Here’s two ways of talking to your audience about an upcoming trade show. You tell me which one you think would get people replying to you:

1) “Come on down to the Trade Show! Product X is now on sale!”

or

2) “Hey, will anyone be heading down to the Trade Show? What kinds of things will you be looking for?”

Post #1 is entirely one-way. It doesn’t elicit any kind of response from your community. Someone reads that, and they think “Ok, that’s nice.”. Now, post #2 on the other hand is flat-out asking your community for input. In one short post, you’ve asked two different questions that they can answer, and get them talking. If they’re going to the show, they can see that others might be, too. If they’re not going, maybe you can ask why and get some info from them on why not. Maybe they’ll tell you what they’re looking for. Seeing what other people are looking for might encourage them to check out stuff they might not otherwise know about. If your special price on Product X isn’t something they’re even interested in, maybe you adjust your promotion to be more in tune with what people are going to see. Both posts let people know where you are going to be, but only one lets them know that you care what they think about it, and want to hear it.

That’s really the key point here: Let them know that you really care what they think. Asking someone for their opinion makes them feel important. It lets them know that they have knowledge that you need. It changes their relationship with you from ‘customer’ to ‘partner’. They are important to your success, and you need to let them know that. How do you do this? By involving them in the conversation.

I feel I must quote Scott Stratten, @unmarketing, as he makes an excellent observation in his book:

“Why do we market to people the way we hate to be marketed to?”

Makes you say ‘Yeah, no kidding.”, and it’s a message that is ignored all too often. How do we like to be spoken to? Like a real person. Like the other party cares about what we have to say, and isn’t just preaching at us from the pulpit. If we can all keep this in mind, not only will our customers become our partners, but they will provide the ∞-way communication that we all need to be better at everything we do. You just need to start by changing your tone.

Do you have examples of companies that have changed their tone for Social Media? Let’s hear about your own success in getting people talking!