10. Plan, Plan, and Plan

If you have been reading the chapters in this book somewhat in order, you have seen us explore a variety of topics. We’ve tackled why you should even bother with social location marketing and where SLM fits into your broader social media strategy. We’ve discussed what the different social location sharing apps are capable of. We’ve learned how to construct campaigns for different types of venues—and even for organizations that have no venue. We have explored the social business, how to introduce the concept to an existing organization, and how to hire the right type of person for a social business.

Now we are going to take everything we learned in the previous nine chapters and put it into practice. As this chapter’s title suggests, it’s all about the plan. More accurately: it’s all about the plan that will eventually be executed.

Before you can execute, however, you need to have more than a social media strategy in place. You need a strong plan—one that incorporates all the concepts that have been discussed in this book.

Identify Your Social Business

The first part of the plan is to examine your existing business and identify those elements that already meet the profile of a social business. Where are you already interacting with your customers in a way that encourages them to provide feedback, ask questions, propose ideas, make complaints, and give praise?

Different departments within your company might already be doing things that a social business does. For instance, your customer service department might already be using Twitter to interact with customers, or your marketing department might already be using Foursquare to interact with potential customers. However, it’s entirely possible that neither of those departments know what the other is doing. Your goal is to figure out who’s already doing what and then organize those efforts into a cohesive social business plan. You will need to identify the skills your company already has, as well as those that are missing. You will sort through each of your company’s existing skills, determining which are social customer focused and which are focused on the more traditional customer.

As we discussed in Chapter 9, Socially Speaking: The Social Business, the key to your company’s success as a social business will be in finding the right leadership. Perhaps this person is right under your nose, toiling away in relative obscurity within your organization. Perhaps this person will need to be brought in from the outside. Regardless of whoever is put in charge of your social business strategy, that person is likely to inherit a group of people that have never worked together or have worked together only in a limited capacity. This, again, is all part of the planning process—how to bring those individuals or even entire business units together to achieve one goal. How this is done is going to vary from organization to organization and the time it takes will depend greatly on the degree of buy-in from the C-Suite to make the change.

Books could be (and have been) written on the best ways to achieve organizational restructuring. I am not going to attempt to cover that element in this book; rather, I am simply identifying it as an essential part of the plan.

Where Should You Be?

The next stage in the plan is to identify what elements of social media will be utilized by the social business. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of saying, “all of them.” However, rarely is this the right answer. Of course Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube get the media attention, but as I have said previously in this book, buzz is not research. Researching where your audience is currently and being aware of where they might be next is essential to ensuring the success of social media use. This knowledge is especially important when building a social business.

You will need to use all the data you’ve already collected about your customers to help you determine what forms of social media your new social business will use. Crossing what you know about your customers with what we know about social consumers in general will give you a much better picture of where your audience is and how they prefer to receive information from your company.

The social consumer can usually be identified as possessing most or all of the following traits:

• Multitasker

• Part of a social network

• A smartphone user

• Highly computer literate

• Strong comparison shopper

• An opinion sharer

For example, if you know that part of your existing customer base consists of busy professionals who have previously communicated with you via email, then you have a valuable data point to match to what we know about social consumers in general. This exercise helps you avoid the “build it and they will come” myth that so many fall into. The social consumer needs a very good reason to visit your website. For example, many organizations believe that putting a forum element on their websites will have their customers flocking to the site providing them with an endless source of people to which they can push messages about their latest marketing campaigns. The reality is vastly different. If social consumers already belong to a community that focuses on their particular interest, and it is built and run independently of providers in the space, why would they be willing to either move or replicate their membership to come to this new community? Social consumers generally come to new sites only when there is some type of content that is available only at the new site that makes using a product or service more fulfilling or because the incentive to do so is overwhelming.

In reality, you need to be prepared to go where your audience is (detailed and well thought out research will highlight where the audience is). It is also essential to build into the plan that the social business team members become a part of the same communities your audience belongs to. It’s important that your social business team members also be active in those communities and strive to be a valuable resource for the other members.

This perception of value can lead to some interesting dilemmas for the traditional business. For example, the social business is not adverse to recommending or directing members of its community to its competition for products or services. At first glance, this seems like brand suicide. However, take a situation in which a social consumer is looking for a complementary service or product to combine with one of yours. Traditional thinking would be to ignore them, hope that they don’t find your competitor, and carry on with other customers. This type of ostrich-like thinking doesn’t work with the social consumer. Social consumers are looking for people to trust, and valued sources of information about a product, service, or vertical.

Recommending a competitor is one way to build that trust. Recommending a competitor shows that you genuinely care and are interested in the social consumer. Further, it shows that you are not just focusing on selling your own products or services. However—especially at the enterprise level—this type of thinking can be seen as disloyal to the company, potentially threatening, and at the very least just bad business practice.

Companies are also learning that consumers don’t always use their products in the ways the companies originally intended. In the past, when a company learned this, it would probably try to advise the customer to use the product only in the way in which it was defined for use and that combining it with another product would in fact be detrimental. Companies did this because they believed they knew what the customer needed. In short, the company believed it knew what features were best for the consumer and how the consumer should use them. However, given the megaphone that is the Internet and social media, consumers are able to articulate the fact that they are not interested in features; they are interested in solutions.

It is an old adage that the customer does not want a 1-inch drill bit; what the customer wants is a 1-inch hole. The social consumer is as much, if not more, focused on this attitude. The social consumer is more marketing savvy and understands (and in many cases can see through) brand messaging. That means if your company can provide a solution—even if it involves a competitor—that solution and, in turn, your company is of much more value than ever before. The steps to getting to this stage will vary from organization to organization. However, showing the value to the C-Suite via metrics around response rates to conversations (which by virtue of value will increase) can aid the adoption of what at first glance seems a counterintuitive strategy.

What You Should Say

It is a constant surprise to me that marketing, PR, and corporate communications departments have no problem creating “information releases” on a schedule that matches events, product releases, financial reporting, and so on. However, when challenged to create an editorial calendar, they often respond with a “but what would we say?” or simply look blankly at me as though I am suggesting something that they have never heard of.

When we conduct social media monitoring for our clients, we often point out to them that we can pinpoint exactly when they have made a press release, without even seeing the press release. Immediately following a press release, there is a spike in social media chatter. This might not be much of an increase (depends on the size of the client and the impact of the news), but nonetheless we can spot it. Shortly after the release and the spike in chatter, there’s an immediate dip—or trough—in social media activity. We can spot it without fail.

This is where the editorial calendar comes in. Don’t leave all your blog posts, Twitter updates, Facebook posts or other social media communications for those days when you are releasing news. If you are utilizing these channels effectively, they will be used to spread that news anyway. Where the calendar comes into its own is for the time immediately after your news has crested on the social media wave and people stop talking about you. It is then that you want the follow-up posts, status updates, and so on. This helps you avoid having a trough immediately following an announcement.

If you have a social media team in place, you’ll be ahead of the game. Having only one person responsible for all social communication would almost certainly be an overwhelming task. However, by having a team of people empowered to create content for social communications, you can create an editorial calendar. The calendar helps you guarantee that there’s always something to share—whether it is industry news, product information, how-to’s, even opinion pieces. These are all valuable elements of the social communication that will come from a well-organized social business.

Using an editorial calendar means that each member of the team knows when his or her pieces are due. The communications are prescheduled for release, which also means that they can be moved around if necessary as things change. For example, a major announcement in the industry might deserve a comment, observation, or analysis from the team. It would be hard to calendar a sudden announcement such as that in advance. In the normal course of events, the team would be left scrambling to cover it or perhaps have to pass on the opportunity. With the use of a calendaring system, other communications are already covered by the process, so when these unexpected opportunities arise they can be taken full advantage of.

With the peaks and troughs smoothed out through the use of calendaring, the social communications team can focus more on increasing volume, attending to sentiment changes (moving the needle from negative or neutral to positive) and ensuring that the two-way nature of social communications is really working. The team will be responsible for finding new ways of incorporating feedback received from customers and potential customers. Your team also will be tasked with identifying new channels that are either being used by customers, or are likely to be used, and dismissing those that don’t fit your customers and therefore don’t need to be part of your plan (although you might still watch them). This last piece is extremely important given the ever-changing nature of social media and the various platforms.

As new social media apps appear, they tend to bring with them a wave of enthusiasm. It is all too easy to believe the well-placed and polished hype that comes attached to some of these new apps. ChatRoulette is a perfect example of this. ChatRoulette was going to revolutionize social media and be an amazing tool for marketing communications. However, when people realized it was simply a place for dubious characters to reveal various parts of their anatomy, they soon abandoned it. That didn’t stop some marketing agencies from convincing their clients to include it in their social marketing communications. Most, however, avoided it—and rightly so. As I have said before in this book, and will say again, buzz does not equal research. Be aware of the buzz and take a look at those apps that attract it. However, before making any decisions, take a step back and consider them carefully as vehicles to carry your message and spaces in which you can interact with your customers.

When you take the time to do your research, you will find some diamonds in the rough, so to speak. Facebook recently made changes to the way users can organize the information they share and receive with a new feature called Groups (they already had a feature called Groups and decided to launch another feature with the same name). Although initially it would seem that this had no real use for marketers, because the intent was to keep groups small, this would provide an opportunity for organizations to form groups around industry-specific topics and invite key individuals to join as part of a discussion group. Just another way a tool can aid the positioning of an organization; you can interact with your competitors in a way that is less threatening to the C-Suite.

Brands could also use Facebook Groups for focus or testing groups for specific products or services. This could be especially true for longer-term research, because Facebook Groups could be a way to let consumers test something out and share information with each other as well as the brand.

So, some new launches in social media are definitely worth a second glance and can be put to some very good uses—and even provide alternative ways for organizations to perform tasks that they are already doing in a more traditional manner. Social media isn’t all about buzz and glitzy ways to utilize gerbils to sell your products. Some of it has practical uses. It’s these practical uses that you can use to sell social media to the skeptics in the C-Suite.

An editorial calendar gives the social business the time to discover these new tools, try them out, and read the analyses that any number of social media thought leaders will perform. After all your homework is done, you can decide if a new tool is a good fit for the way your company runs its social business.

The calendar is so much more than just a reminder to get that blog post out.

We the People

One of the things that scares enterprise-level clients that we work with more than anything is when we tell them that social media happens online and in the real world. If you want to be a true social business, you have to meet your customers, face to face. For people working in a small business, this isn’t too scary because small business marketers are often also the owner, co-owner, or manager with several other responsibilities—not least of which is interacting with the customers. At the enterprise level, however, marketers are often insulated from having to deal with the great unwashed masses that actually pay their salaries. Usually, these marketers are protected by the sales team and the customer service department. If the company is a business to consumer enterprise (B2C), quite often the marketer is insulated from the customers by the store staff as well.

Keeping yourself insulated from the public is bad for business in general, but it’s fatal for the social business. First, whatever your business is—whether it’s B2B or B2C—make sure that every member of your social business team spends time (and I mean significant time, not just a few hours) meeting and working with the customers in a face-to-face environment. Your social business team needs to shadow field sales reps, work behind the counter, walk the shop floor, or whatever it takes. Get them in front of the customer; let them hear and see what the customer says and does when interacting with the brand.

If you are a direct sales organization, get your social business team on the phones—and I don’t mean just on the training line. Get them to take sales calls. Get them on the help line and have them work with customer service. Why? Because unless they actually get to know who their customers are, they are never going to understand how to communicate with them via social media.

The marketers that I have worked with who always struck me as clueless relied solely on research and statistics for their assessment of how a campaign should be conducted. These truly clueless marketers had never actually interacted with a customer. This is all too common, especially in the Fortune 500. It is also ridiculous. Would you want to drive a car designed by someone who didn’t have a driver’s license? Of course not. Then why let someone who has never spoken to a customer communicate with them? That makes no sense to me at all—regardless of the academic studies they have completed or the real-world experience they have. Unless they have actually mixed with customers, they are not going to be much help to you in your social business.

It is also important for your company to meet your customers where the customers shop and congregate. You could interact with them at conferences, Tweetups, events, festivals, and so on. These do not have to be major events that your company creates or sponsors. The goal is to allow members of your social business team to meet with your customers and interact in a more social way.

While you’re attending the larger events, you can organize smaller events that put you into direct contact with your customers. So, for example, hosting a wine-tasting event in a local bar during a conference where a handful of key customers or potential customers are the invited guests can pay much greater dividends than simply running a prize giveaway at the conference booth.

A properly constructed social event gives your guests the opportunity to talk about you on social networks without you having to promote yourself. Often these opportunities are not even recognized by brands. For instance, your company sends a few employees to a conference to staff a booth with the extent of the planned communication starting and ending at the booth. If your employees are part of your social business, however, they can turn the odd opportunity of bumping into another attendee or two at the bar or dinner into a business opportunity down the line. Social organizations make social opportunities happen. They create an atmosphere of social connectedness. This doesn’t mean throwing wild parties. It means providing opportunities for the potential or existing customers to establish rapport without being sold to.

It’s is important that your employees understand that customers are more than numbers. By bringing back the real-world stories of customer interactions, the rest of the company can get a true sense of how the customer is interacting with the product, service, or brand. This applies equally to the B2C space as it does to the B2B space. Social media is often seen as the darling of the B2C environment (and that is true). Social media, however, should not be overlooked in B2B. It takes a little more creativity to fully leverage social media in the B2B space. After all, the customers in the B2B space are still people, and your organization still wants their feedback and input into how you are performing as a vendor.

Social media channels are as valid for B2B space as they are in the B2C space. Although a gerbil-laden Facebook campaign might not be the direction you want to take your B2B efforts, and the offer of a free cup of coffee for being mayor is likely to seem irrelevant to your business customers, the platforms themselves still provide enough opportunity for them to be a part of any social communication plan.

What is required are two things: a knowledge of your customer and some creativity. Yes I have stated those before, and I will do so again because both of these are at the core of any social media campaign. It is a constant surprise to me how many organizations launch communications campaigns—social media or otherwise—with these pieces so obviously missing. The disconnect between the customer and the marketing department is, in my opinion, why this happens. Bringing the people who are responsible for the marketing communications closer to their audience will in turn enable the audience (customers and prospective customers) to get closer to the organization, which is the overall objective of the social business.

Your social business plan therefore needs to include training for your social business team members that involves them getting closer to the customer in the real world.

They Said What?

At some point, all organizations face the difficult customer scenario. Through the channels provided by social media, organizations are now exposed to those awkward moments—those times when they see a comment about their product, service, or brand that they wish that they had never seen, and yet need to see because without those comments they will not improve.

At the enterprise level, it can be especially difficult to translate some of these into actionable events without more information. For example, if your company receives a comment on a social location sharing app that reads, “the person behind the counter was rude and gave very poor service,” but leaves it at that, you have very limited information. You know the location of the store, the date of the transaction, and the approximate time of day. However, beyond those details, you have no real information. This is where a plan comes into effect. By creating a decision tree as part of the plan, which covers various types of interactions and responses that have already been approved by both the legal department and the C-Suite, an enterprisesized organization can respond with the agility more familiar to the customers of small- and medium-sized businesses.

This decision tree approach allows contingencies to be enacted without reference to senior management and therefore can be delegated across the social business to areas where there are a greater number of resources.

Back to our example: First, you are going to want to contact the customer, because whether the incident happened exactly as described or not, the customer’s perception is that this was a bad experience—bad enough that he or she chose to share it with his or her network. It might take a little research to identify the customer, depending on how much that person has shared with, for instance, Twitter or Foursquare. Your first contact with the person complaining should always be an apology that stops short of implying liability. This can be something along the lines of “Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. Let us know how we can make it better.” A short reply such as this lets the customer know that your company is listening and is interested in a dialogue that might lead to the situation being rectified.

In the interim, the location in which the complaint was made can be contacted for additional information. You may also start your standard process of analyzing that customer feedback. Again, it is important that the social business does not circumvent these steps in order to simply “quiet” a noisy customer. Some organizations have already had their fingers burned while trying to put a quick end to a public problem. Social businesses should not become victims of their willingness to listen and placate any customer simply because they have received negative feedback. There are those unscrupulous individuals who try to take advantage of businesses for personal gain. Some people do this for nothing more than building their own reputation for being able to make companies jump through hoops.

Your response plan should ensure that both sides of the story (the complainant’s and your company’s) are heard in a timely manner. This plan also should ensure that your company’s pre-existing procedures are incorporated, but in a way that does not impede the response. Remember, in the fast moving social media world, you don’t have as much time to react as you would offline, which is why your initial outreach to the complainant is so important. Whereas you once might have had days or weeks to respond to an angry customer who contacted you via mail, you have only hours to respond to a social media complainant. Having a plan in place greatly reduces the amount of time it will take you to react to customer complaints and more importantly, quell customer backlash before it takes on a life of its own in the social media world.

It’s Not All Doom and Gloom

Bad news is not the only news. Often companies come to social media expecting that there will be nothing but complaints. They view their social customers as being the vocal ones in their community and—like the squeaky wheel—are the ones in need of oil. This is not the case. In fact, many of our clients brace themselves for their first report only to find that there are few, if any, bad reports about them. Some seem positively insulted that no one has thought to write something bad about their product, service, or brand—as if this were some badge of honor.

However prepared they have been for what they feared would be a deluge of negative sentiment about them, I have yet to find a company that was prepared to handle the flood of positive sentiment with anything other than a shrug and a sheepish smile. Neither of which is communicable to the content creators.

Again, the plan needs to incorporate a set of appropriate responses for the positive sentiment and especially where individual employees of the company are singled out for praise. Just as there are escalation paths for negative feedback, so there needs to be escalation paths for positive feedback, depending on much the same criteria:

• Who is providing the feedback?

• Who is their audience?

• How long have they been customers?

• Is their experience repeatable by other consumers of the product or service?

• Is it repeatable by the organization?

• Was it a normal run of business event or an exception?

These criteria are important in determining how the positive feedback is handled beyond a simple “thank you.” Of course, saying thank you might be all that is required, but providing more than that is the way to increase affinity and encourage loyalty among customers. A customer is unlikely to share the news that her favorite brand thanked her, but she is very likely to share the news that her favorite brand sent her a gift card as a thank you. This difference in terms of response is how a social business differentiates itself from its more traditional competitors.

If your company’s social business plan includes these kinds of responses and your team members are empowered to use them without approval from upper management, you can greatly improve your response time to social media comments, both good and bad. Your company’s response isn’t the only thing that’s important to your social media customers. Those customers also value the speed in which the response is made because the social consumer perceives quick acting companies as being connected to them and valuing their time.

Look Small, Think Big

The often stated aim of companies entering the social arena is to get closer to their customers. However, what they really mean is that they want to engender a feeling more often associated with smaller, more community-oriented venues such as the Mom and Pop corner store. However, when considering a big box store that has more employees than some small towns have residents, it is an almost impossible problem for which to find a solution. The social business enables a move toward this feeling. I hope it is becoming readily apparent to you that the social business plan is central to moving the enterprise in this direction.

As much as we have discussed the enterprise social business plan, you should not think that this type of plan applies only to companies at that level. A social business plan should be integrated into every organization, regardless of size. If your company intends to use social media in any form, you need a social business plan. This will help prevent it from simply become a “fad”—something that was tried once or twice and then forgotten. Your social business plan needs to become integrated into the way your company does business.

A small, single-location business can have a social business plan that’s just as effective (even with limited financing and staffing resources) as a larger enterprise’s plan. The execution of the plan is where the variance will largely be, but that is true of all forms of marketing communication. Social media does, at least to a degree, level the playing field, and smaller businesses should capitalize on this as much as possible to ensure that they remain competitive with their larger cousins in their neighborhoods. The ability of the small business to “know” their customers—and in some cases, the fact that they are already close to them in the real world—makes it easier for them to get close to their customers in their online world.

Early elements of this part of the plan can be as simple as telling your customers that the business is engaged in social media. Promoting your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your venue page on Foursquare in your business’s physical location is all part of this plan. However, a sign that simply reads “Like us on Facebook” (which I have seen more times than I care to remember) does not constitute being social in the real world. Remember social media is part of marketing communications, so why would you have a piece of marketing communication that exists without a call to action? Back to basics—don’t lose sight of the purpose of all this social business:

• Increase awareness

• Increase customers

• Increase revenue

A sign that reads “Like us on Facebook—You could win a monthly prize” (with details of what the prize might be) is much more likely to get a response.

Being clever about it doesn’t hurt, either. For example, try to create something that gets the interest of customers as they stand in line to check out. If the ad reminds customers that they can connect with your business right then, right from a mobile phone, you increase the odds that customers will take action. The odds increase because customers doesn’t have to remember to do it the next time they are in front of a computer.

Figure 10.1 shows how simple the message can be. This ad has a call to action, prompts the customer to respond, has an element of intrigue, and a sense of fun. It has all that, and it takes a few minutes to put together and very little in the way of financial investment to print off a few and place them around the store.

Figure 10.1. Your message needn’t be complicated. This one is simple, clear, and fun.

This idea is just an example of how to get started. I’m sure your creative endeavors will be sharper than this. What I wanted to make clear was, with all this talk of a plan, don’t overthink it.

Don’t try to be so clever that your customer doesn’t get it or that you get so caught up in the process and procedures that your organization never actually executes anything (I’ve been there with clients, too). There is a fine line between having a strong enough plan that can be executed and a plan that is so nailed shut that execution has been planned completely out of the process.

Where that line falls will be something that the organization figures out as it develops a plan for its social business. Incorporating existing procedures is definitely something that is recommended, because no one embraces change less than the large enterprise. However, don’t let the incorporation of those procedures make the plan into something that can’t be executed.

Local Wins the Day

When putting the plan together, it is important to ensure that the organization—whether enterprise or small business—not forget that in real terms, your customers and potential customers are “local” to you. By local, I mean they are local whether temporarily, in the sense of being visitors, or in the permanent sense that they inhabit the same town as your store or venue.

Apps such as Bryan’s Local List and TriOutNC are taking the concept of social location sharing and making it hyper-local. Bryan’s Local List focuses solely on the Orange County area in California, and TriOutNC focuses solely on the Triangle area of North Carolina.

TriOutNC describes its service as offering a point incentive system as a way to get involved when you are out and about in the Triangle. Points are accumulated on a weekly basis by checking in, posting a review, or rating a location. You can win virtual awards based on your checkin habits, as well as The Key, which is a special honor for being the user who has checked-in the most times at a particular location. Businesses often offer their own specials or rewards for checking in a certain number of times or for being the Key Holder to their establishment.

These apps seek to become both the location service and also the promotion platform for local businesses in specific regions. The idea is that residents like to support their locally based businesses over big box stores and visitors like to gain local flavor.

Certainly there is a segment of the social consumer base for which this is very true. The model that both of these apps follow is designed to make it easier for small businesses to take part in this type of marketing. Small businesses can track results from the shop door to the checkout without requiring an entire marketing department to do so.

Even the large retailer should consider this type of option as a method of promoting themselves to the local populace (though at the time of writing, Bryan’s list does not permit large brands to use the site). As hyper-local enters the mainstream vocabulary of marketers, we will see more of these types of social location sharing tools that allow even national chains to act in a more local way when choosing social marketing communications channels, in much the same way as they have done previously with radio or television.

Micropayment Systems

When considering the local focus, don’t forget to also include micropayment systems. These have been popular in Asia for quite some time now and are gradually spreading to the United States and Europe with the increased adoption of smartphones. Systems such as Venmo, which was originally set up to share money between friends, are already gaining popularity among merchants who want to enable customers to pay with their cell phones rather than with loose change or by using credit cards for small purchases.

Venmo actually allows for transfers of sums up to $1,000 in one transaction, so conceivably it would be possible to pay for much larger items. (Although I think that the social consumers are not currently feeling safe enough to want to make payments of this size with their cell phones.)

However, paying the tab in a coffee shop or at a bar is a much more reasonable proposition. Austin-based company TabbedOut is designed to solve this type of payment by enabling smartphone users to open a tab at select venues via their phones and close it when they leave the location, without ever having to hand over their credit cards. The dual appeal of this service to users is both the convenience and the capability to take one type of identity fraud out of the realm of possibility. Handing over a credit card to wait staff is definitely one way in which people can have their identity stolen. Using a secure payment system via a phone is, according to TabbedOut, a safer way to make those payments.

I think there is still some resistance to both of these concepts, with the most obvious being, “What if I lose my phone?” The counterargument is, however, that it would be the same as currently losing your wallet. Both arguments are valid, and only time will show if the marketplace and its users are ready to explore a truly mobile world in this way.

Check Out

In closing this book, I hope that you have found the ideas, suggestions, and information useful. If you have, let me know. I’d love to hear from you. If you have questions about the content, please feel free to email me, tweet me, or contact me through your favorite social media channel. I’m pretty easy to find online, as Incslinger. I’ve listed some of the more popular places to find me on the following page.

I hope that you enjoy sharing your location as much as I do, and that your business finds a way to incorporate this new channel into your marketing communications strategy and plans. If you have any questions about how to do that, you can always contact me about those. If you really have problems, you can just hire my company to solve them for you.

As with everything that goes into these types of books, by the time you read it something will have changed. As far as possible, I tried to future proof the book, either by avoiding those platforms that I thought would not still be around by the time this book hit the shelves or by making sure that the ones I included were stable enough for me to recommend to you.

Find me online:

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In real life—Simon Salt; come say hi!