In part 1 of ‘what are your customers saying about you‘, we looked at some research from digital communications company Quba showing that not enough companies are monitoring what their customers say about them online. Doing this – and responding to them – is called having a social media strategy

So what can you do to develop your own Social Media strategy?

The first thing is to find out what your customers are actually saying about you online. If you have a blog or a forum on your website then getting customer feedback is quite easy – the happiest and least happy will be sure to share their feedback with you directly.

But what about those people who will simply give feedback elsewhere on the web, or on their social networks?

There are two separate tools you can use to find out what they’re saying. First, set up a few ‘Google Alerts’ using your company name, and your domain name. If you think there’s a chance that people will discuss you personally then set up a Google Alert for your personal name as well.

With a Google Alert, every time Google comes across a new mention of your company, domain or name as they crawl the web, they will send you an email with a link to where your company is mentioned. You can set up a Google Alert here.

This won’t necessarily give you up to date mentions of your company name since Google can take up to 3 months to trawl every website.

The second thing to do is to search on Twitter for mentions of your company name. The great thing about Twitter search is that you can instantly find where your customers are mentioning you. However, you probably don’t have time to constantly search for mentions of your name on Twitter! To save time, use a service like Tweetbeep.com to send you a daily email with all new mentions of your company name. Its free.

And what exactly do you do when you find people mentioning or talking about you or your brand?

The short answer is: get involved!

If people are criticising your company, then enter the conversation and let them know you’re sorry they had a bad time. Find out what went wrong. Is there anything you can do to rectify it? It often doesn’t take much to turn a negative reviewer into a positive one, once that person knows they’re not being neglected. And you get to publicly show your customer service skills to other people reading the thread.

That doesn’t mean you have to concede that the customer is absolutely right in what they’re saying. If you put your side of the story, and it seems fair, then anyone viewing the thread will see that you have a reasonable point of view.

If customers are saying good stuff then you might want to thank them for their feedback. You need to make a judgment as to whether or not you can add anything to the conversation – sometimes its better to let customers speak for themselves, so as to appear more impartial.

If you can identify the customer then it might be a good idea to send them a personal email thanking them for their comments.

The other good thing to do with positive comments is to channel them towards the better known reviews sites for your market. If you do get positive feedback – either as an email, a comment on a blog or forum, then ask that customer to share that on reviews websites you think influence users most.

We’ve talked about reviews sites before. They are increasingly important in influencing customer decisions: people are more likely to take the opinion of an impartial reviews site than a customer service agent. And in our ‘Google the Innovator’ series we showed how Google itself is increasingly displaying the results from Reviews websites.

Here a are a list of well known reviews websites; you probably know a few for your industry too.

pricegrabber.co.uk
reviewcentre.com
shopzilla.co.uk
ciao.co.uk
dealtime.co.uk
truste-marketing.co.uk
webuser.co.uk
maxxsave.co.uk
dooyoo.co.uk
resellerratings.com

Have you put a ‘social media strategy’ in place? Have you had any positive or negative experiences with it? Leave us a comment below.

Before the Internet came along, it wasn’t always easy for companies to find out what their customers were saying about them. If a customer had a good or bad experience, the most they would probably do is share that with a few friends down the pub, or mention it over a meal with the family.

If companies wanted feedback they had to ask customers to fill out a ‘customer feedback’ form; and ask their customer service agents what customers were actually saying about them.

Both these channels give a very partial view. People giving feedback would be at either end of the spectrum: they had either loved dealing with your company, or had completely hated it.

Now of course, in the era of social media, customers have lots of channels to spread both their good and bad experiences of dealing with a company. Aside from leaving comments on that company blog, they can submit reviews to reviews websites, leave posts on relevant forums, and of course give feedback through Facebook and Twitter of their experiences.

This makes it so much easier for companies to find out what their customers are saying about them. And it means there is a lot more ‘colour’ and texture to their feedback, rather than a polarised view of ‘brilliant’ or ‘rubbish’.

And apart from finding out what customers are saying, it also gives companies the opportunity to take part in that conversation. If its a good comment, then a company can  give thanks; and if its a bad one they can respond by trying to resolve that customers’ issue, or at least put their side of the story.

And from a product point of view, listening in to what your customers are saying about your product has to be one of the best ways to find out what you need to do to improve that product.

Despite all these opportunities, research out this week from digital communications company Quba has revealed that only half of businesses monitor what people are saying about them on the web. Just a third of businesses have someone who actively manages their online reputation.

Here’s a graph showing it all, published in New Media Age magazine:

For reasons we’ve stated, the reality is that all business should monitor what people are saying about them, and respond to it too. Doing this is called having a ‘social media strategy’.

Check out how to develop your Social Media Strategy in ‘What are your customers saying about you part 2‘.

As you are by now probably sick of hearing, the latest release from website maker WebEden allows you integrate your WebEden website with both Facebook and Twitter. This allows you to update both Facebook and Twitter from your WebEden site, and also invite people in your social networks to become a ‘member’ of your WebEden website.

And with the HTML widget, you can also display your Tweets on your WebEden site too.

Also, we have spoken elsewhere in this blog about good Twittering tools that help to drive traffic, and ultimately sales on your website.

But can you really measure the effects of all this social stuff?

Well, to start with, you can use Google Analytics or other link tracking tools to measure how many clicks and sales you make from the links you post in Twitter. (If you’re interested in finding out how to add Google Analytics to your website, then please let us know using the comments box below.)

Dell proudly announced recently that they had made more than $3m of sales from links that they placed in Tweets. The Dell account @delloutlet has over 600k followers, and whenever they have a good offer they Tweet a link to it. Dell reckoned that the people clicking on these links have bought more than $3m worth of PCs from them.

But many others are saying that the development of a social community around your product or service cannot be directly tracked to a boost in the bottom line. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter should be about listening to customers, interacting with them on an informal basis, and finding out how they want your product to change and develop. It should also be about supporting customer needs, and communicating with them in a way they want to be communicated with.

Because all this touchy-feely interaction should ultimately lead to a recommendation and a good review. It’s that word of mouth stuff that is the jewel in the marketing crown. It just so happens that it is the most immeasurable thing too.

And maybe there is a flaw too in even trying to attribute the bottom line benefits to your social networks. It could be argued that in the example above everyone who was following Dell would have probably bought from them anyway, its just that they happened to click on the Twitter link. In fact, maybe they were going to buy a full price Dell but were lucky enough to get the same product for less because they saw the Twitter post.

Have you tried utitlising your social networks to connect new people with your WebEden website? Have you seen any direct or indirect benefits from Twitter or Facebook? Let us know about your experiences below.

Lots of you have grabbed to new social networking features of the WebEden Website making system with both hands. Last week we showed you how to send out membership invitations to your website. This time around we show you send updates from your WebEden website to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This really is exciting stuff!

How did you get on? Leave us a comment below

Members only areas or client only areas can be useful ways of providing privileged information to a select group of your site visitors. This can allow you to create better relationships with these people and use your website to present or distribute information privately with a guest list that you directly control. It’s one of the features that makes WebEden unique among other website builders, and extremely powerful.

We’ve also been asked about ‘paid membership’. By using Groups to create a set of VIP members it is possible to charge a fee before adding a member to that group, though this has to be done manually. So here’s how to do all of these things.

Members only pages

Creating members only areas is reasonably easy and very powerful. It also means that anyone who joins your site will immediately get access to that page so there is no manual work to update the permissions with each new member.

Once again I’ll be using my favourite and highly ranked taxi website www.joeslondontaxis.com. (some of you will remember this from our series of SEO Guide articles).

To create a members only area first click on ‘People’ in the Toolbar and then the ‘Permissions’ tab. Here you will see a list of all your pages on the left, and the permissions settings of the selected page (or pages) on the right.

Every page can have its permissions set individually, or you can change the permissions for multiple pages as once (use the ‘control’ or ‘shift’ keys while selecting pages to select several at once).

I’ve created a page called ‘members welcome page’ which allows me to give a special welcome to my members. If I position this top of my pages list, then this will actually replace the normal ‘welcome’ page for members when they visit the site. Clever eh?

To make the page members only select the page from the list on the left, then change the ‘view’ settings for that page to ‘members only’. And that’s it.

Client only areas

Creating and managing Groups is the key to client only areas. Groups can have permissions set as a whole, and any member who is part of that group will get those permissions. You can add or remove members from Groups at any time.

If you don’t have any Groups you will need to go to the ‘group’ tab first and set one up. I’ve created two groups, one called ‘Clients’ and one called ‘Drivers’.

Next go back to the ‘Permissions’ tab and select the page that you wish to edit from the list on the left, then change the ‘view’ settings for that page to ‘Group’ and you can then choose which Group can see that page, e.g. Clients. I’ve done this for my ‘clients’ page, and also my ‘drivers’ page.

You can then add or remove individual members from that Group to control which ones can see that page. Here I have added 2 of my clients into the ‘Clients’ group, and selected the third in preparation to add him too (or her ;-). This would be the same process if you were creating a VIP section of selected members only.

You can also create members directly for clients by going to the ‘members’ tab and clicking ‘create member’. You can then define a username, password and email for the this client when you create the member. Once the member is created you can add them to a Group on your site so they have the correct permissions. Finally you can email your client with their username and password and a link to the login page. The ‘create member’ function makes it easy to setup client only areas without the client having to do anything themselves.

There are numerous ways you can use this kind of functionality, so have a go and let us know what you think!

Update 28.7.09
To give you a helping hand we’ve put together a video tutorial that shows you how to add members to your website.

And here’s one that shows you how to send membership invitations.

And finally, here’s how to send updates to Facebook and Twitter.

We’ve talked about Twitter, Facebook, and other social media quite a bit on this blog. Lots of the issues raised have been about whether or not it is possible to use social media websites to promote your own website.

But if you’re not entirely sure about how to launch your social media campaign, then you’re not alone. Research by McCann Erickson Bristol published this week indicates that two-thirds of marketers don’t have a clue where to start. The research says that marketers recognise social media websites to be more than just a fad, but just don’t know how to best make use of them to promote their own website.

Around 50% of marketers surveyed said that social networking sites – like Twitter and Facebook – were blocked by their IT departments. It’s a bit difficult to market your product using Twitter if your company doesn’t let you use it!

Just over half were using social media ‘profile raising’, 48% for networking and 30% for advertising.

Here’s a table that shows it all:

The advertising agency running the survey was quick to say that brands needed to use social media: “Word of mouth is now more powerful than ever – opinions can be shared with a global audience at the click of a button.” And how best to make use of social media? Presumably the agency think that one way around this is to pay them a large amount of money…

But all cynicism aside, how exactly are you supposed to make use of social media? We’ve covered one possible way to use Twitter. But how about Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and all the others?

If you’ve got a good idea you can share, or have an opinion, leave a comment below.