Biznology

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I’ve had a few clients ask me recently what a Facebook fan is worth. I hate seeing the crestfallen looks on their faces when I tell them, “Zero.” They are immediately puzzled, however, because they know that I am an advocate of using social media for marketing. So, I quickly explain that it doesn’t provide any value to your company to have a fan, but what you do with a fan can have great value if you take advantage of this new relationship with the company.

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I had the pleasure of speaking at the same private client event as Dennis Haugan, the Senior Director of Web Marketing Strategy at T-Mobile USA, the American wireless arm of telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom. Dennis spends his days improving customer experience across a wide variety of digital properties, including e-commerce, self service, product microsites, official social sites (on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and mySpace), and retail interactive portals. Dennis was kind enough to consent to an interview that includes his innovative approach to curating social media and other Web content. I think you’ll enjoy it.

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Most people try to play by the rules, but I got a question last week as to exactly what the rules are. I think that’s the wrong question. The rules for what constitutes search spam (violations of the search engines’ terms of service) change all the time, but that’s not the point. Rather than looking for a point-by-point enumeration of what is OK and what is forbidden, you should instead focus on the philosophy. If you don’t understand what the sniff test is for whether something is worth doing or not, read my latest post on Search Engine Guide, “How do you know what is search spam?“

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by Frank Reed
I am knee deep in a project for a client that is designed to take their national presence and represent it locally (in Google primarily) through making sure their 28 local branches are found in local searches. It’s an interesting process and is not as easy or clear-cut as it sounds. The project, in fact, has made me wonder just how many companies like my client exist out there. My suspicion is that there are more than I can imagine.

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I was flipping through a copy of Fast Company when I saw another one of those quotes. You know the kind I mean, where the CEO talks about how treating the employees right ensures that they treat the customers right. Some of them are just saying what people want to hear, but this particular quote was from David Pickens, the president of the highly successful Olive Garden chain of restaurants. Pickens summed it up nicely with, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”
You’ve probably seen lots of service companies talk the same way. Home Depot swears that their employee stock program is a big part of what helps their employees care about their company rather than the company.
So what does this have to do with the Internet? Plenty. You might not realize it, but social media is turning every company into a service company. Think about it.
You’re never going to have a blogging department. You’re going to have employees that blog on top of their day job. Maybe it’s that engineer in product development talking about the new technology coming along. Or that veteran sales guy who has forgotten more customer problems and solutions than most people will ever know. That’s who you want writing your blog posts. How do you get them to write things that make the company look good? Treating them well seems like the least you can do.
You’re never going to have a Twitter team, either. Or a message board department. If you expect your customer service team to check to see what complaints are popping up online, you might need to treat them nicely.
Of course, you don’t have to treat anyone nicely. You can just order them to hop to—get on those message boards and monitor those tweets and write those blogs. Then you can sit back and see what happens. But it might not be pretty. Forced social media looks forced. Instead, allow your happy and enthusiastic employees to let their attitudes shine through.