If I’d been writing a book like this 15 years ago it wouldn’t have been about social media – I mean, I was using stuff I would now call social media but the term itself didn’t exist at that stage. I was a tech journalist so I was using all sorts of things before they really took off and went mainstream – it’s the nature of the job.

For most of the business world, 15 years ago the questions weren’t about how they interacted with their customers but ‘should we have a website’ and ‘is email worth the effort or is it just a passing fad.’ No, look, really, it wasn’t a given. They got through that and then made the terrible discovery that just putting a website up there didn’t mean that loads of customers would suddenly turn up.

This was a bit of a shock to a lot of people. The initial hype around the Internet was very clear: if you were a small computer seller somewhere in a shed you’d be able to compete with the mighty Dell overnight (we’ll be hearing from Dell later in this chapter). This was of course a pile of old nonsense; if, say, Amazon could afford a massive warehouse of books, CDs, and videos (not DVDs at that stage) and take out full page adverts in magazines, on London tube platforms, and elsewhere then they were always going to have better reach and fulfilment than their smaller counterparts.

If we leap back to the present day then we have the same thing happening again to an extent. The smaller businesses heard that they could interact with their customers and a lot of them got very excited. Many forgot that they’d have to get their clients to their social media feeds in the first place, and then keep them entertained. The prospects would be even more difficult.

This chapter is about those new customers and getting them to respond. It’s about turning the ‘social’ side of your business into ‘commerce’ – otherwise why bother?

It’s about smaller businesses – I’ll be talking to A Suit That Fits in Bermondsey. It’s about larger businesses too, Dell is included as a smaller, second case study in a few pages (not because it’s an unimportant company but because my guess is fewer readers will expect their business to reach that size any time soon. Or if they do, they’re not going to expect to get there on the strength of a £12.99 book. You need at least two books for that.)

In this chapter you’ll have a look at:

• Attracting a customer or client’s attention in the first place
• Making sure customers and prospects really feel engaged and that they are getting a personal service
• Strategies that have worked, strategies that haven’t
• Getting feedback from customers when your business feels remote from them.

Hey You, Want a Bargain?

The obvious way for any marketer to attract someone’s attention and get them to come and buy from you is through an advertisement. The equivalent on social media would be a Tweet, LinkedIn update, Google Plus notice depending on how those work out over time, or Facebook page entry, preferably with something a bit promotional on it.

Sometimes they’d be right and sometimes they’d be wrong. A lot of companies have come in for criticism for doing nothing but announcing offers on their pages and feeds. Worse, they can invade privacy however well intentioned. Here are some howlers people have made, gleaned from websites (which I’ve credited).

• Announce the competition – then don’t announce a winner
  A blogger at Bosmol.com points out that if people enter a competition and don’t win, they expect to know who did. This has two unlooked-for effects. First if you don’t name a winner they’ll think there wasn’t a prize and won’t join in again, probably won’t buy anything from you. So you congratulate the prize winner publicly, right? Right-ish! You first put in the competition’s terms and conditions that you’re going to mention the winner, otherwise they may feel they’re having their Twitter/Facebook contacts shared without permission. A tiny point one would hope, but people are very sensitive about privacy on social networks.
• Bore the reader with nothing but promotions
  Again Bosmol.com is among the sites pointing out that if you do nothing but promote competitions and deals – unless that’s all your business does in which case fair play to you – people will lose attention very quickly indeed. Obviously this is counterproductive in any medium, particularly in one devoted to engagement.
• Hijacking current affairs
  In my first book on social media I highlighted an example of a furniture company trying to hijack the ‘Iran’ hashtag to sell sofas. This was a bad thing and the brand suffered – I assumed it was a one-off, until the riots in Egypt in February 2011, when American designer Kenneth Cole’s business tweeted ‘Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online … ’
  The backlash was inevitable and the company apologized immediately, although the full text of the Tweet reportedly appeared in one of its store windows for a while.
• Not putting any corporate branding on their Twitter feed
  Unbelievably people still run corporate feeds without putting their company logo onto it, as American marketer Rodney Rumford points out on his blog. This is crazy – there is every opportunity to upload a picture of your latest or newest product, or logo, as the background to your profile page. The profile needs filling in too. At the time of publication one of the worst offenders – oddly – was @bbclondon, which is genuine but hadn’t taken the trouble to upload any basic information or to use anything but the default Twitter ‘egg’ for its Twitter picture. This changed to a logo just as we went to press.
• Spamming
  One day someone will come up with a definitive answer as to what constitutes Spam on something like Twitter or Facebook. But constant and overly frequent marketing messages and exortations to ‘buy my service’ probably qualifies and is not recommended.

Suit You, Sir (or Madam)

I have a feeling I’m dating myself quite badly with that sub-head. Nonetheless I’m going to write a little about the tailoring industry in this section. We’ll come to the interview a little later but for the moment I’d like readers to consider only one thing: the tailoring experience. Not all of you will have been to a tailor but you’ll have seen the idea on TV and in magazines – you get measured up, fussed around, you spend thousands (over £2K for a Savile Row suit).

Of course it’s cheaper to buy a ready-made, off the peg suit. But there are people who might spend a little more for something more individual and it’s these customers who are the focus of the next case study. The initial task, then, is to persuade that customer that it’s worth spending the extra money, and social media are one way in which the point can be made.

The first thing you have to do is to attract that particular client’s attention. This is where David Hathiramani, joint founder and managing director of A Suit That Fits, has scored pretty highly. The business is a tailoring company but not a traditional one; it’s one of the wave of online and partly offline lower-budget tailors that started in the first decade of this century. It wasn’t the first but is certainly among the higher-profile due to a concerted marketing effort. It didn’t want a swish and expensive shop front from the beginning, and when it began in 2006 Hathiramani and his colleagues were already Facebook members so engaging through social media came naturally. ‘We thought the people we were wanting to sell to were like us; the idea was engaging for our kind of age group,’ he says.

This isn’t a book about clothing but that age group at the time would have been people in their mid-twenties, so they were getting serious jobs and looking less fabulous in teenage fashions but weren’t yet in a position to go and spend four figures on a bespoke suit. Part of the eventual mission was to allow them to measure themselves for their own clothes if they felt confident enough, which potentially detracts even further from the service element (although having a tailor measure you is still a service on offer). And this was the first generation to ‘go native’ in the social networks so there was an easy crossover into the social channels. There was always going to be more than just a company Twitter page.

Hathiramani explains that there is a multi-pronged approach. There is a general company Twitter feed which mentions company information to anyone who may be interested and which highlights blog entries, as anyone would expect. ‘There are also kind of fun experiences with photos that may not be high quality pictures but they’re good enough for our Twitter feed, so they go there rather than onto our website,’ he says.

This actually says something pretty interesting about the Twitter customer’s expectation; they don’t expect excellent pictorial quality all the time, whereas in this business’s perception the website reader will expect something that feels more permanent. So if a celebrity happens to drop in – as happens occasionally – a snapshot might appear in the Twitter feed with permission but if it’s not a formal photo shoot there’s no expectation it’ll be archived permanently.

As he says, this isn’t the only Twitter feed for the company. Every style advisor, of whom there are several in the branches, has his or her own Twitter feed prefaced with the initials ASTF – so Hathiramani tweets as ASTFDavid. ‘You come to us because generally you like the person who’s dealing with you on the other end and we try and get likeable characters to work with us,’ he says. ‘They’re all a little bit eccentric in some way I think and so what we like to do is to kind of showcase their personalities.’

It suits most, although not all, and Twitter isn’t compulsory for staff. Engaging rather than selling, however, has many benefits. ‘For example, David Minns [branch manager] in Bristol seems to have an ongoing relationship with GQ Magazine on Twitter which is quite neat because he posts things there, we Tweet him and they get on well with each other.’ This suits him and other style advisors Tweet in different ways. ‘It’s a good way of our customers actually seeing the personality of the style advisor before booking in,’ says Hathiramani.

Individual Tones

Source: www.facebook.com/aSuitTF page used with permission of A Suit That Fits. Facebook and the Facebook logo are trademarks of Facebook, Inc.

This combination of personalization with a corporate flavour should work well for any people-oriented business. Hathirimani also offers a number of other pointers from experience:

• The branding is consistent, everybody’s Twitter handle starts off with ASTF so there’s no doubt it’s the company Tweeting someone. ‘You have to remember the way you Tweet is like the way you send from a company email, you have to do it in a way your company expects,’ he says. The business has had to remind people in the past, for example, to remember the sort of language they’re using while they’re Tweeting or Facebooking on the company’s behalf.
• The tone can be as individual as you like but the core values have to be respected. ‘Our values as a company are to be open, friendly, honest, entrepreneurial,’ says Hathiramani (although if you can find a company that would disagree with those values I’d be stunned). You can find underlying issues by watching the social engagements, he says. If someone writes something that chimes badly – maybe it’s abrasive, maybe it’s argumentative – it could be a sign of a more general clash with corporate values.
• Take advantage, though, of someone’s individuality. If the England Rugby Team turn up somewhere wearing identical suits, resident rugby fans on the staff are urged to blog about it because their passion for the sport is bound to come through and customers will find this engaging.

Hard Cash

None of this would serve the company in the slightest were it not making money. This is why it has Google Analytics solidly in place on its website so it can see where the customers are coming from. More recently Adobe has come out with an analytics package.

There are useful results and figures available, which help to inform the business how it should allocate its staff’s time on these networks. ‘We can see that Twitter traffic doesn’t generate so many appointments but it doesn’t get that many clicks,’ says Hathiramani; in other words few people click through to the website from Twitter compared to other electronic sources but the ones that do tend to make an appointment and/or order some clothes. So for this business it’s a good way of attracting new prospects, not because they click in droves but because they tend to be more committed once they’ve clicked.

Like a lot of correspondents in this book, ASTF is keen to grow its business through social media but is aware that it’s not possible to find out where every customer has come from. If you make an appointment on the website you’re asked where you found out about the company and about 30% of people actually answer, which is a higher ratio than many manage but it’s still a minority. ‘Sometimes it’s not black and white; you know anecdotally that some people will have seen [your Facebook or Twitter] and others will see you two or three times and buy more.’ So working out the value of a Tweet in terms of what it costs and what it pays is a far from exact science. Hathiramani’s answer is to look at the overall business and see how it’s growing – the rest, how it would have grown without these engagements, is pretty much speculation. Facebook, while this book was being written, was getting the company about two appointments a week out of 120–130, he says, but this is only the people who have confirmed that they came through that channel. Others will have seen the page, the Tweets, maybe heard from a friend, or seen a promotion in a newspaper.

What would potentially have been missing is the pampering element, the personal service I discussed above. Hathiramani is clear that this needs to be substituted somehow and to an extent this is achieved by having all of the style advisors from the branches on the blog and on Twitter. ‘It goes out to all our customers and makes us seem friendly and approachable,’ he believes. ‘It’s part of our personality and we try and get the individuals who will actually be serving you to do it, so you get a first hand feeling of what it would be like to come in for an appointment.’

For all that, it’s different. If you want wood panelling, fussing around, and all that goes with a traditional suit fitting you’re still better off with a traditional tailor. This ‘social’ version is a modern riff; others are adopting it with either more or less electronic interaction (another one I know reasonably well, King and Allen, won’t take self-measurements but sends e-newsletters and runs e-competitions and engages on Twitter – you pay your money … )

Both have engaged using the social media, and neither goes for the hard sell. Both have done well through the social media.

Dell

A substantially larger concern using social media extensively is Dell. It’s old news by now but it’s still worth revisiting that company’s big impact on new customers who discovered an element of the company of which they had been unaware, and they discovered it through Twitter.

Essentially, in 2009 not everybody knew that Dell Computer was a business that would sell its computers cheaply when it was either about to redesign the whole range or upgrade them. In practical terms this means that the appearance might change but you have a perfectly workable computer, or that a more powerful version is about to become available. If your computing needs are comparatively light then you might find that the version the company has been selling happily enough for the previous three years is perfectly adequate for your needs.

Hence the refurbished store on the Dell website. People weren’t as aware of it as the company wanted, so in 2007 it set about engaging with Twitter users about how they could be missing bargains. By the end of 2008 it had sold $1m in computers which it attributed directly to this feed, and on 11 June 2009 it blogged that it had reached the $2m mark. These were all sales which were tracked back to the idea of not only promoting directly through Twitter but through answering questions as well. The result was not only the $2m sales through the outlet store but a further $1m in sales to people who came in through the store then found something they’d rather have elsewhere in the store. ‘I started tweeting more regularly and doing more Twitter-exclusive offers, which created more buzz and helped us to grow our follower base (we’re now over 600,000). Our followers responded by re-tweeting @DellOutlet messages to their followers, and our numbers rose even more,’ says the 11 June 2009 entry on the blog.

A tiny minority of readers will be able to match those sorts of numbers, and of course these figures were backed by a brand which had already been massive since the 1980s. It’s a good illustration of how social media were turned to solid cash by one particular corporation when still relatively new. Dell still uses social media of course – and it’s in the newer areas where there are lessons to be learned.

Public Sector

Dell’s Rishi Dave, executive director of online marketing, works with the public sector and large enterprise business units at the company. It’s immediately obvious that social networking is maturing, because it’s so often categorized as something consumers do but to which public sector and larger enterprise are less suited. Clearly if Dell has seen an opportunity this is changing. In terms of responsibility, Dave takes the social media engagement and the Dell.com engagements.

The first thing that has to be done on this scale is to make it coherent and as in other examples throughout this book, to achieve some sort of coherent corporate voice. Dell, remember, is a computer company and so employs a great many technophiles. ‘What we found was that we had many employees who wanted to communicate in this way with customers, through social media’ says Dave. A lot of them were a little afraid to go ahead because they didn’t know whether they’d get into trouble, whether they needed permissions and so on.’

The answer for this larger corporation was to invest heavily in social media training. This means not only training people in terms of guidelines and what they may or may not say but also on how to use the different social media channels.

Dell found that once it had done the training and effectively granted permission for its colleagues and employees to take part in social media it had a very motivated workforce worldwide. People were suddenly promoting the company to customers in a way they had not done before, and in ways the company hadn’t expected. ‘Training is an incredible component, and you also have to provide the right tools across the company,’ says Dave. ‘So the right listening tools – we use Salesforce.com and Radian 6.’

These are sophisticated, paid-for tracking tools for social media engagement and results; less expensive options are discussed in Chapter 8. It’s essential to have something more sophisticated as a company’s needs grow; these tools listen to and evaluate the business’s social engagement worldwide. The company has a centralized social media command centre which monitors some 25,000 Dell mentions a day across the world, identifying opportunities, noting when positive comments are going viral and when something needs monitoring or a response.

Related to this is a centralized social media team for the worldwide business, which picks the right tools for the team overall. On this scale a business needs a governance structure about how the various properties and stakeholders interact with each other as well, so that the individual interactions at the edge of the corporation are managed and governed centrally.

Results

Once again the engagement – and you can imagine on this scale that it has required substantial budget and commitment – has to be evaluated. And as we get further away from 2009 the idea that ‘this once made the company $3m’ is going to be less and less of a convincing answer.

The company still measures exactly how much revenue it drives through Twitter, unlike a number of smaller businesses; this is because it can track a customer’s journey through the different channels more effectively than the micro business because, frankly, it can throw money at the process. It has a social outreach team and processes which track how the business turns a detractor into an advocate, and is very conservative with its figures so that they don’t get exaggerated.

This is powerful marketing information. On the business-to-business side it can be easier as the communities of customers are tighter-knit so it’s easier to get to know who is buying from you. Critical customers can be identified so the company knows when it is being evaluated for a major purchase and can push them further along the sales cycle. The pattern of sale is different in that the larger business-to-business customer will typically have a longer cycle, Dave confirms, though, that the major, major driver behind the social media engagement is bringing up the bottom line sales figures.

The aim of this chapter has been to tell you something about approaching complete strangers to turn them into customers by going through the social networks. We’ve looked at some strategies which haven’t worked in the past and established, I hope, that the sell-sell-sell approach is unlikely to produce many results beyond a group of aggrieved customers. We’ve seen that some of the oldest mistakes in the world have resurfaced as people have hijacked inappropriate Twitter conversations to push their own agendas and promptly fallen flat on their faces.

Then we checked over the more positive side of what’s achievable, and the answer was: a very great deal. You can find new customers. You can get your customers to find new customers – come on, a referral scheme is hardly unique to social media or the Internet, but you can do it a lot more easily than you could before we all went technologized. As your business grows and gets more sophisticated it’s possible to track this stuff even more thoroughly than you did before with tools that become more affordable – and the beauty of the Internet is that the thing can scale worldwide as your business develops. I’d say this globalization was relatively painless but I’m worried someone in technical support for one of the corporates would actually murder me.