Social business Archives

13 Social Business Tips To Be Like Amazon

08/12/2013 By Jayme Soulati

It was inevitable. The Apple has finally fallen from the tree. In its place is Amazon, the astonishingly innovative company with sales of $61 billion that continues to bulldoze through industries with acquisitions of consumer-products companies, online sites, e-stores, clothing and accessories, beauty products, and just about everything under the kitchen sink including The Washington Post.

Yes, Jeff Bezos last week announced his purchase of The Washington Post for$250 million for the purpose of ______ insert best guess.

As Fast Company states in its September, 2013 issue, “Amazon has done a lot more than become a stellar retailer. It has reinvented, disrupted, redefined, and renovated the global marketplace.”

Apple built its empire under a force to be reckoned with who is no longer of this plane. It focused on new technologies and really smart devices that spawned mobility for the technology savvy and millennials.

And then we learned last week that it’s a new day, Android has assumed control of the mobile phone market. Another previously secure realm wrested from Apple’s grip.
Back to Amazon. As the powerhouses in mobile cellular technology and tablet duked it out for an ever larger decreasing slice of the pie, Amazon steadily grew its empire as an answer to the every man.

Amazon realized the consumer is in control; the consumer has the power.

Consumer is King.

As you well know, we’re in the post-social media adoption era. Consumers are on board and have built mini-empires of their own on Facebook and blogs. There is mass consumption of content.

What’s more, consumers now have the simple ability to complain, and influence purchases. When the pocketbook is no longer free flowing for the latest novel gadget and gizmo by Apple, then consumers turn to online shopping for the best deals.

How did Amazon do it? Through blood, sweat and tears; through ample quarters of no gains, and by recognizing consumer is king.

13 Social Business Tips For Your Company

Scale these 13 tips from the Amazon playbook to your business:
1. Innovate or die.
2. Insulate against irrelevance.
3. Embrace change.
4. Be creative and be human.
5. Serve your customers everywhere.
6. Become a social business.
7. Engage leadership in social media and earned media.
8. Make your consumer king.
9. Breed loyal followers.
10. Always look into the future; carpe diem.
11. Track, analyze, test, learn, execute; repeat.
12. Be smart and thoughtfully smarter.
13. Build a solid and efficient infrastructure.

Amazon is ripping up retail like the roadrunner, and the big box retailers are shoring up their defenses. The shopping mall as we know it is dead. Get out while you still can.

Soulati Media On The Street: Body Z Alive Hydrotherapy

02/20/2013 By Jayme Soulati

In Santa Monica last week, a surprise “gift” by my cousin provided a bit of nervous Nelly freak out, fear and eventual appreciation for the oft misunderstood service called colon hydrotherapy aka colonic.

In this Soulati Media On The Street interview, you’ll meet the zenmeister herself, Louretta Walker, owner of Body Z Alive in Santa Monica. She shared with me why hydrotherapy is important to a healthy colon for detox, lightness, emotional balance, and for hydration.

Here’s a secret, because the first time is always a bit scary, I recommend going again knowing the process. And, when you have a pro like Lou to lead one through the steps, there’s no question you’re in good care.

I promise to answer all curious George questions in comments and more sensitive ones via email! Giggle.

Brand Engagement And Organic Twitter Followers

01/14/2013 By Jayme Soulati

twitter logo map 09 (Photo credit: The Next Web)

This needs to be said — LOUDLY. Each of my nearing 4,600 Twitter followers is organic; are yours?

Twitter sued five companies in April 2012 that sell followers on e-Bay and elsewhere for increasing exponentially and untruthfully the numbers of followers a peep has. If you’re at all interested, the defense is being represented by an Above The Law columnist. I follow this e-zine, and if the columnists are as adept writing editorial as they are in the courtroom, uhmm, Twitter needs to watch its back. (The companies responded within the last week; my, my, the judicial system takes forever.)

Oprah has 14.5 million; Barack Obama has 21 million; Justin Bieber has 29 million followers. Wasn’t Ashton Kutcher the first celebrity to get 1 million followers back in the day? Celebrity is the operative word; makes sense.

When I say my followers are organic it means this:

I follow people who follow me first.
I have never gone rogue to gain high numbers of followers, and many do this with Twitter apps like TweetAdder and TweetBuddy.
Having oodles of followers is challenging to manage my stream; when I see content that makes no sense to my topics of preference (like sales junk), I clean out.
After four years on Twitter 24/7, I ought to have 10,000 followers by now, right? Perhaps. It’s all in accordance with how you manage your brand in business and how huge you want to get with that extra attention.

Brands And Twitter

That’s a great point (if I say so myself)…should brands get the highest number of Twitter followers possible?

Think about what that looks like to a community, follower, prospect, or customer.

When a brand engages in higher numbers, the first impression is akin to a high Klout score. It’s all about influence. That brand seems to be influential and more followers will come on board.

It’s totally up to the brand how they use that opportunity, though. As I mentioned in my post here about my analysis about Harry and David’s Twitter stream — does your business engage in social media or is it a social business?

Think hard about how you, your brand, your company, and organization use Twitter. This channel is a force to be reckoned with as long as you know what you’re doing — posting, engaging, growing, and being fulfilled with success you measure buoyed by metrics you deem apropos.

Analysis of Brand’s Twitter Usage Sheds Light On Social Business

01/08/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Credit: Social Business Today, 2011

Inspiration for this post came directly from Socialized!, the book by Mark Fidelman on what it takes to be a social business. Not 25 pages into the book, a section entitled “People Are More Loyal to Socially Engaged Businesses,” prompted this ponderance (yep, a word coin) about how well-known brands engage on Twitter.

I’m going to pick on Harry and David, the 80-year-old grower of Oregon pears that has become one of the seasonal faves for online shopping during holidays. I recently thanked them for their wonderful customer service, so I’m a promoter of their brand after being somewhat of a detractor recently.

In this section in Fidelman’s book in which he references a study by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey of 1491 consumers 18+ about brand engagement and loyalty on Twitter, he shared:

“60 percent of brand followers are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after following the brand on Twitter.
50 percent of brand followers are more likely to buy from that brand.
79 percent of those surveyed follow fewer than 10 brands, and a whopping 75 percent of Twitter users don’t follow brands at all. “

Fidelman’s interpretation of this data goes like this:

“Depending on how you interpret the data, that can mean either opportunity or difficulty: opportunity in the form of a rich open field of Twitter users who want to engage with your brand or difficulty if most Twitter users don’t want to hear from brands.”

Think about that a minute; I’ll wait.

Harry And David Twitter Stream

After writing a positive blog post about the brand Harry and David and then reading this section of Fidelman’s book, Socialized!, I decided to take a look at the Harry and David Twitter stream to see if that business was functioning as a social business, a social media business, or merely monitoring and being reactionary on Twitter.

Here’s what I found:

From December 17, 2012 to January 7, 2013, there were 47 tweets in the Harry and David Twitter stream.
Of those, 24 tweets were oriented to responses for negative customer experience.
12 of the tweets were positive comments to customers’ experiences.
6 tweets were neutral about customer experience.
5 tweets were actual outbound content relating to product, shipping, holiday deals.

Let’s do a bit of analysis about the Harry and David tweet stream relating to interpretation about being a social business or a socially engaged company:

With the volume of shipments flowing out of the Harry and David distribution centers during the holidays flying to all corners of the U.S. there are bound to be customer service and delivery snafus.

Of the 24 tweets oriented to negative customer service experience, some of the issues were about tardy delivery, frozen fruit, lack of sender identity. Why would consumers use Twitter to report and/or complain about these issues? The Twitter team can’t do anything about that but ask for an email notification so the issue can be routed to the appropriate department.

A tally of only 47 tweets doesn’t indicate that much traffic during this prime time period of holiday deliveries. What that means is the Twitter team (probably also managing Facebook), didn’t have to always be reactionary. The team could’ve scheduled tweets to post during all hours of the day and evening across time zones to share news about deliveries, products, best sellers, donations to charities, storm interference with deliveries, etc.

The stream had few company-generated posts oriented to marketing and sales messages or brand amplification. This was a lost opportunity for the social media team to really boost its presence on Twitter with more than just “sorry you had a negative experience.”

After reading and counting so many “sorry/negative” tweets to make this analysis, I waffled on whether the company had a poor holiday season OR this was par for the course and the company was happy with the 2012 holiday season. I wouldn’t know that, but hopefully the marketing director does.

Tips on Using Twitter For Business

Remember that all content posted on Twitter stays in the stream. Anyone can read posts from past time periods. Mix up the content so it doesn’t sound the same!
There should be approved corporate messages about the company, its products/services, its team, its events, hours of operation, etc. that are scheduled throughout the day on Twitter. These filler posts help keep the brand fresh.
Analyze your company’s usage of Twitter; is it reactionary? Are you using Twitter to respond only to negative customer queries/comments? If so, ensure you mix up the content postings to balance the net promoter scores.
When you’re an online retailer, like Harry and David, with food products, tweet all day long about your favorites and best sellers. Moose Tracks have got to be a best seller next to the pears! Share something about that alongside the good news about mouth-watering sweet pears, for example.
If the social media team is tired and working to maintain the pace during holidays, be sure and switch out some people with a fresher perspective. The tweet stream needs to maintain a liveliness that keeps people’s attention.

Brands have a huge opportunity to make a difference on Twitter. Keep it fresh, post content about the company, respond to customers, and engage new customers, too.

As a final thought, companies are not social businesses yet; many have just now begun to feel comfortable engaging and building communities on a variety of channels. What’s next is to really look internally to see that all departments are playing together inside instead of functioning in traditional silos.

What Is A Social Business?

01/07/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Engaging on social media channels with customers and prospects does not a social business make. Being a social business requires this for starters, and more. Becoming social inside and out by engaging stakeholders at all levels takes consistent effort and clarity from the C-suite to the sales organization and elsewhere.

To really understand how to evolve into a social business from a social media engagement position, I recommend a book authored by Mark Fidelman called Socialized! How The Most Successful Businesses Harness The Power of Social.

I’ve only read word for word through page 40 and became too excited not to share this book for small-to-medium enterprises as well as larger corporations. Its teachings are for all types of business and that includes not-for-profits and academia, as well.

In the first several chapters of the book, my pages are marked up and dog-eared. Mark interviews the experts and authors who’ve already paved the way with tomes on each phase of the social media revolution, and he dots his writings with fodder from executive interviews and his professional experiences with Forbes as the Socialized and Mobilized columnist.

Essentially, what Mark is trying to instill among corporate executives is that social media is the here and now; it’s not going away, and it has forever altered the business landscape of yore. Executives not on board need to be…yesterday.

There are still so many companies grappling with social media, and as Mark puts it so well, “Companies that are ignoring (social media) communities will soon find their customers moving to better neighborhoods.”

Indeed!

Who Needs To Read Socialized! ?

Anyone trying to convince a client that social media adoption has to occur, needs to read this book.
Anyone in a marketing department having issues earning consensus throughout the organization about a social media deployment strategy, needs to read this book.
Anyone who is a social media blogger who wants the most recent research at the tip of the finger to reference in blog fodder or in thought pieces, needs to read this book.

So What Is A Social Business?

Everyone has their own definition for their own organization; however, Mark provides a simple explanation – “businesses that have learned the philosophy and strategy of using social technologies to create more adaptive businesses.”

A benefit of being a social business, according to Mark, “provides real-time dynamic feedback from employees, customers and partners… with collaboration and social technologies that make it easy to capture, store, and share organizational intelligence.”

So many businesses today are content having a marketing team with a social media guru leading the charge. Perhaps it’s one or two people who tweet and post Facebook content or maybe it’s an external agency working on social media strategy with one person internally.

That is not what a social business is all about. Mark is clear in his writings about the necessity to have a solid team of seven various experts who manage a different aspect of social media, mobile and intelligence with an internal or external perspective.

The book dives into critical discussion about business culture, developing an internal digital village for employees, engaging externally, provides a strategic social playbook, identifies the social employee, and discusses ROI indepth.

As I continue to read every word in this book, because it is that good, I’ll be writing posts about what I’m pondering. Run and get your copy, and then we can have a healthy discussion below. The really cool news is that Mark Fidelman is everywhere. He’s accessible on Google+, Twitter, Forbes, LinkedIn, and gosh, maybe Pinterest?

Soulati-'TUDE!

Consumer is King.

13 Social Business Tips For Your Company

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