Office of the Mayor

6) On Social Media, you have the unique opportunity of taking your relationship with consumers to the level of friends, or at the least pleasant acquaintances.

—

Do not miss this unique opportunity of befriending your customers. No other media has allowed for befriending your customers to date. E-mail marketing, especially when not customized, is known to be spam. Trade shows are a temporary marketplace. Telemarketing is annoying. Mobile messages are the devil’s creation.

The @ symbol on Twitter and comments via Facebook are what truly humanize this medium. And the power contained within each is more significant than you can imagine.

A customer usually ends the relationship with a client once the purchase is made. If the product is good, then they’re happy. If not, then they live with it and maybe end all relations with the establishment.

On social media your customers can tell you whether they’re

:)

:(

>:-(

Which makes it possible for you to address their concerns, join in their elation, or quell their anger.

But this is just customer service and good social media conduct… and leads us to the topic of our next Secrets, which will be next Monday, October 3rd: What to Post to Turn Customers into Friends.

From ‘Unfriend’ to ‘Recommend’ and ‘Attending’ - people are going to be able to do a lot of new things as Facebook unveils even more features during its f8 conference.

The network that defined social media and created a backbone for it is now set to seep in even further into our lives.

The meaning of all this? Well, there are ways marketers and small businesses will be able to see what people ‘Want’ or notice, for example, the media that users have been accessing and enjoyed. This allows for the creation of a smoother and even more focused content development on part of developers.

And the audience will just have a constant knack of ignoring traditional advertising. What most businesspeople and marketers fail to see is that this level of customization makes each customer more demanding, snotty towards generalized attempts at grabbing their attention and gives faithful loyalty to brands that cater to their every whim and fancy.

So better get your customer service in order, it’s going to be a Facebook world.

mirchmedia:

With 29 million blogs (more than WordPress at last count), and at least as many millions of posts every day,Tumblr is a force of nature in the Internet ecosystem that cannot be ignored. That massive audience means opportunities for businesses to find fans and build brands.

Here are six tips for kickstarting a Tumblr strategy that will grow your presence on the platform.

The short-form, fast-paced nature of Tumblr lends itself well to content curation. The platform is optimized for creating collections of bite-sized media.

With the click of a button (the “reblog” button to be precise), you can instantly post someone else’s Tumblr content on your own. Businesses can leverage this to create their own curated resource for all of the interesting things they observe in their niche.

Of course, curation works best when accompanied by original content, or when a slant or opinion is appended to the curated work. This is why many businesses choose to use Tumblr as a supplementto a longer form WordPress or Typepad blog on their own domain as part of a stock and flow content strategy.

“Liking” and commenting on relevant Tumblr content may seem like a subtle gesture in comparison to reblogging, but there are a few ways it gets you exposure to new audiences.

Every time you “like” something another Tumblr user has posted, your name and link get put in tiny letters at the bottom of that post. This can lead targeted users to your Tumblr page. If you reblog a post and add your own comment to it in your reblog, your update on the original post’s feed gets more real estate. It’s a great way to get incremental exposure.

When you add relevant comments on posts, you foster relationships and goodwill, which often translates into followers.

Keep in mind that what goes around comes around. Being helpful, thoughtful, and friendly goes a long way. Being self-serving will only get you unfollowed.

Whenever you author an original post on Tumblr, include a link back to yourself as the source. This little “watermark” will get reposted and shared every time another user decides to reblog your post.

This not only turns into valuable links back to your tumblelog, but it also gets your brand name spread further out into the Tumblr ecosystem. Branding plus backlinks is a powerful combination!

Every post you tag goes into the general Tumblr archive for the tags you specify. If you post a photo of a hurricane and tag it with related words like “storm” “tropical storm” and “hurricane,” your photo will appear in all three of those tag streams. It’s yet another great way for your brand to be found.

While your goal should be to tag your posts as extensively as possible, remember to keep the tags relevant. Anything that can trigger an alert in readers head to indicate that you may be “gaming” (or worse, “spamming”) the system can mean unfollows. Good behavior and etiquette wins out in social media in the long run every time.

Tumblr is a fantastic way to squeeze more life out of original content. For example, if you run a longer-form blog on your own domain, take the best excerpt or quotation from each new post and repost it on your Tumblr.

Many brands will cross-post photos from Instagram, or take the most popular updates from their Twitter or Facebook accounts and repost them on Tumblr. Different audiences tend to hang out on different social platforms, and the real-time nature of Twitter and Facebook make the likelihood of your audience seeing your dual update unlikely. And if your updates are interesting, your readers won’t bat an eye if they see it twice.

Tumblr has become the classic platform for launching incredibly focused theme blogs. This lends itself well to humor, but it’s often just creative in nature. From tumblelogs dedicated to things that are polka dotted to ProPublica’s “Officials Say The Darndest Things,” Tumblr makes meme-creation easy. It’s a common strategy for businesses and news organizations to create a Tumblr as an entertaining outlet on the side of more serious content.

As with any social media platform, success in building a following boils down to being interesting, being consistent, and being social. Curation, commenting, quoting, tagging, watermarking, and riffing are mainstays of social content, and when leveraged well, they can build you a big presence on Tumblr, Twitter, and everything in between.

*Sourced with love, Mirch.

10) There’s no reason you shouldn’t be on top of messages sent to you via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook. Your brand is alive now, it needs to breathe, respond and be courteous. It needs to make people feel that they’re talking to someone who cares.

Be accessible to your clients.

New social media websites pop up faster than zits during puberty. Everyone is trying to one-up the other and create a site that will suck up the most user time out of all the other options.

Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook

Yes, sites like Orkut did pop up in the middle, but they had somewhat of a lukewarm reception in the U.S. and did superbly well in unimagined territories such as India.

You first had Pandora -> Last.fm -> Spotify

The list of copycats and minor improvements or changes in User Interfaces (UI) is tremendous in all genres.

But how can a small business keep up with all the presence online without being overwhelmed?

1. Go to where your customers are - out of the range of various social sites, your clients will be tied together in age, sex, and psychographic qualities. For example, a site like OkCupid and Plentyoffish will attract the single population.  LinkedIn is better for HR than Facebook. MySpace was the perfect way to spy on both social and professional contacts.
2. Build your own niche once on the social media site. It’s good to have a ton of media to share. Relevant, sharp, short and worthwhile content posting on whichever site you begin to either advertise on or participate in is going to go a long way in helping you garner genuine friends.
3. Once established on a single site, it’s not necessary to maintain detailed profiles on others. If you become the king of your Facebook page, there’s no need to repeat the process on Google+. Give your social media hungry fans something different on each media resource. This is a great way to diversify your content and turn non-believers into faithful followers.

It’s not easy keeping up with the Zuckerburgs of the world, but what you can do is master the art of creating useful content and always participating in conversations.

via mirchmedia

20) Make your social media handles easy to remember and reach.

Auto-generated URLs are not good for your Facebook presence. Even your personal brand should have a unique username.

Just follow this link to upgrade your Facebook username RIGHT NOW: http://www.facebook.com/username

#45 Work hard. Work smart.

Post often. See what your audience likes. Post more of what your audience likes. Get smarter with the content. Your audience is not dumb. In fact, if you post an engaging post, they’ll like you more and come back often.

A meditator always practices glad acceptance. If you’re on Twitter, I’d love to have you follow this new trend.

Why are people fascinated by miniature objects? Whether they be model railroads or even seeing the likeness of one famous building situated in another place? The Eiffel tower is breathtaking to view from a close look, but why is it that we get so excited when we see the same structure located on the Las Vegas strip?

Something about the familiar in an unfamiliar setting makes us experience the thrill of novelty while being based in a comfortable and safe environment.

Let’s face it, people fear change. We don’t like getting older, fatter or more absorbed in our habits. The only things that we try to cling onto are constants.

Now, how does this psychoanalysis apply to social media?

When you weren’t online, what were you doing with your friends? In social situations… you were meeting, discussing, eating and drinking together. You were sharing stories of things that had happened to you. You were informing others of your life.

What do you do on Facebook, Twitter?

You share your day’s activities with others. You’ve not changed a bit. You’ve only been now given a new media outlet to do something that is actually quite natural to you. Normally, people are afraid of technology and new devices. There is a learning curve that goes along with it. What social media sites have done outstandingly well is create a tool to have human experiences utilizing the automated universe of the Internet.

And so, they have mastered creating a familiar situation for you to be comfortable in while getting hooked into a novel experience.

The benefit is mainly to those that have a monetary intake. Wherein, during a normal everyday conversation, your friend knows that you’re dying to go watch the new movie or eat at that new restaurant. But through social media, now the advertiser is in on the knowledge of your likes and dislikes. And so, they stand to benefit by simply being attentive.