Chapter 4

Building Trust and Credibility

In This Chapter

Choosing messages that win followers

Harnessing the power of listening and responding to your audience

Constructing the foundation for a trusting relationship with your community

Measuring the response to your messages

Without trust online, you have nothing. In fact, you might have less than nothing. It’s better for you to have zero social media engagement (SME) than to have massive but untrustworthy engagement. If building trust and credibility online isn’t on your agenda, slowly close this book now and prepare for your social networks to begin gathering digital dust.

Earning Trust in Social Media

Trust can develop in two ways:

Your audience engages with you, already believing that you’re worthy of their trust. If this is the case, you’re in the clear unless or until you break that bond of trust.

Your audience demands that you earn their faith.

If your following is the former, lucky you. Aim to continue building — not breaking — their trust. To deal with the latter, read the tips in the next few sections.

Making your message clear

Diving in to engage in the social media sphere without ever having given thought to how your brand should be viewed or the messages you should convey is dangerous — and even more so if your brand uses social media publicly as a team. Take the time to flesh out your messaging — not simply its content but also how you express it.

Giving your team clear guidelines

Putting in place your official social media engagement guidelines presents a unified voice and begins the process of engineering the foundation of your audience’s conviction that you’re worth their time, energy, and — eventually — their dollars.

To set up SME guidelines, follow these suggestions:

Do your homework. Dig a little. Find out who your audience is, where they spend their time, and what they’re already talking about. The more you know about them, the easier it is to tailor your message directly to them.

State your mission. As a brand or a business, you should have already developed a mission statement. Now it’s time to make that statement relevant to your social media approach to guide your team as they begin to share your message publicly online. USA.gov calls its approach the “guiding principle” and reminds everyone working on its social media team that everything it does is “motivated by this principle.”

Make them short and sweet. Your team doesn’t need guidelines the size of a novel. If your written guidelines are too long and complicated, your team won’t understand them, process them, remember them, or use them to engage. Guidelines that are succinct are easier to commit to memory and to follow with ease.

Allow for experimentation. You can follow your guidelines — and you can also “color outside the lines.” Trusting that your team can effectively use the information you give them, and expand on it, pushes your message to the next level of engagement.

Interacting authentically

We suspect that the word authentic raises your buzzword hackles, if you’ve heard it (as we have) time and time again in reference to social media. Yet the words real and genuine, though they mean the same thing, don’t seem to carry the same punch to relay the importance of the qualities of your brand when engaging with your community online. This list describes the brand qualities that create authenticity (and build trust) in social media engagement:

Personality: Show some. Your audience engages because they feel invested in who you are as a brand or company. Are you fun and fearless or serious and savvy — or the one who brightens their day? Showing personality gives a glimpse of the people behind the brand.

Honesty: Nurture it. Honesty goes hand in hand with the trust you’re trying to build. When someone in your community asks a question, respond to the best of your ability — and be truthful. If you don’t know an answer, promise to find out. Trusting you, they’ll come back to learn more. Return with an honest answer.

Transparency: Give your SME teams names and faces to create personal connections. The Kodak account on Twitter, for example, is run by the company’s chief blogger and social media manager, Jenny Cisney. It’s her face you see when you communicate with Kodak on Twitter, as shown in Figure 4-1. When people know that they can connect with an individual behind your brand, your brand becomes personalized.

Ownership: Take responsibility for your mistakes — they happen. Your community will judge you far more harshly if you attempt to act as though they don’t. Owning up to praise is easy. Also respond openly to your customers’ questions, concerns, and criticisms. Your greatest critics can become your most outspoken fans when they trust that you hear them and respond honestly and transparently.

Use the word you when engaging in social media rather than refer to generic customers or people. Your audience prefers that you speak with them, not about them or at them. Make it personal.

Figure 4-1: Jenny Cisney is the name and face behind the Kodak account on Twitter.

Finding your brand’s voice

One step in conveying your personality online is finding your brand’s voice. If you’re building a bigger brand that involves many people behind the brand, you still need a unifying voice that everyone who posts online for your brand can use.

Figure 4-2 shows how CoverGirl uses Instagram to reveal its unique personality, by showcasing new makeup, trends, and events in keeping with its followers’ expectations.

Not every attitude translates well online, and yours may not be perceived the way you intend. If you personally are the brand, be careful about the personality you convey when interacting with others online. As you can see in Table 4-1, there’s a fine line between the quality you’re aiming for and how others might see it.

Contributing meaningfully to the conversation

Conversations are happening everywhere online, and many of them take place in social networks. Become part of those conversations in a way that makes sense to your brand and your business goals and to your audience.

Recommendations from friends and family, and even those from social networks, are referred to as earned media in the advertising world. According to Nielsen, of the consumers who were interviewed worldwide, 92 percent say that they trust earned media more than all other forms of advertising (www.contentcurationmarketing.com/consumers-trust-earned-media-more-than-paid-media-according-to-nielsen/).

Figure 4-2: CoverGirl expresses its brand identity on its Instagram page.

According to ROI Research, of the users who were interviewed, 58 percent of Twitter users and 53 percent of Facebook users who were interviewed said that they’re likely to purchase a product after following a company or product in social media. Trust in a brand, and interaction with it in social networks, can translate into sales.

We cover online interaction in much more detail in Chapter 7. For now, follow these tips to start entering conversations in the right places and in the right ways:

Investigate the topics that matter to your audience. Research to find out where they spend their time and what topics they care most about. See whether you can reach them on Facebook or Twitter, and whether they're willing to read your content or respond to beautiful pictures, for example, on Pinterest or Instagram. A tool such as Followerwonk (www.followerwonk.com) assesses your followers' interests and creates a word cloud, a visualized series of words compiled of the most popular user-generated words or tags. The word cloud is for you to showcase those interests on your website or other social media platform. You can also ask current customers and prospects where they spend their time online and what they're comfortable doing there.

Build your social media presence. After you know where your audience interacts, go there. Create a Facebook Fan Page or sign up for Twitter or start a Pinterest account. Hire a writer to compose content for your blog or even for your social networks. Listen, respond, and start engaging. Let your audience know that they matter to you from the moment they connect with you.

Continue asking questions. After you have established a presence in suitable networks and you’re building an audience, continue asking them questions. Prove to your audience that their thoughts and opinions matter to you by asking them what they think and by listening to what they have to say.

Mabel’s Labels, a small business based in Toronto, Canada, established its footing firmly in the social media space by interacting daily with its customers. The company knew that, to be successful, its representatives had to discuss topics other than Mabel’s products. The business regularly asks questions of its followers, answers questions, and follows up on discussions the same as in face-to-face conversations. See an example in Figure 4-3 of how Mabel’s Labels asks questions.

Figure 4-3: Mabel’s Labels asks questions of followers every day and then follows up with comments as the company’s fans reply.

A meaningful conversation is one where the parties involved gain value from the exchange. Not every conversation is easy. Sometimes, events that are beyond your company’s control affect your business and your customers. Use your social networks to maintain the dialogue about what is happening as it happens so that your customers feel acknowledged and important.

Create an incentive

Asking questions isn’t the only way to inspire people in your online community to start talking. Sometimes, you need to do a little more to keep your customers curious, engaged, and interested in coming back to your online presence — and to keep them talking about you publicly to their friends, fans, and followings. Sure, people are often happy to describe their plans for New Year’s Eve, the foods they’re eating for breakfast, their favorite restaurants in San Diego, or the best parts of their day, but after they answer, they have no incentive to come back.

Make your audience feel like an important part of your brand, like they’re part of the family or part of your team.

Share quality content — yours and others’

Blasting content about your company, products, or services 24-7 is the same behavior exhibited by the kid in the front row in third grade, who continually raises his hand and shouts, “Me! Me! Me!” Surely your followers like you for a reason, but they want to know that you’re more than a one-trick pony. Here’s the key question to ask: Do you share quality content about any topics other than yourself or your brand?

To do so, move outside your brand sphere and look for compatible brands and individuals who can help you educate, inspire, and entertain your community. Take a look at Chipotle, for example — a chain restaurant that has quite a following. At this writing, the company has more than 2 million Likes on its Facebook Fan Page. Chipotle works with chefs who provide audiences with recipes and cooking instructions at events and align with organizations such as the Farmer Veteran Coalition to support good causes such as helping mobilize veterans to feed those in need across America (see Figure 4-4). The company posts updates to Facebook with content about these other individuals and organizations.

Figure 4-4: Chipotle posts information about individuals and organizations it works with to supplement content about itself.

Listening carefully to your community

Broadcasting to your community and never stopping to listen to what they have to say in return makes it impossible, in the long run, for others to trust you. Think about the times you’ve had conversations with friends or colleagues and suddenly realized that they weren’t even listening to you. “Listening” online usually requires reading. Finding the most relevant information to read — in this case, people’s opinions about your brand — starts by monitoring online conversations. Though we advise you throughout this book to be attentive and responsive in your own social networks, you also have to listen beyond them.

A variety of tools can help you better listen to your community and to the online community at large. In Parts III and IV of this book, we discuss the listening tools and techniques that are unique to the social networks Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

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Responding promptly for greater impact

We know that it’s impossible for you to be online and monitoring your social networks 24 hours a day. Set a schedule for regular checks of your online communities to manage the conversations in an organized fashion. More important, in addition to setting alerts to hear what the online community is saying about you (see the nearby sidebar “Checking out conversations about you”), make the time to pay attention to your community so that you can hear what they’re saying to you and respond in a timely manner.

Check in regularly throughout the day to catch what is being said that doesn’t reach you by way of alerts. Go online during the periods when the largest number of people — including your customers and prospects — are present: early in the morning, midmorning, early afternoon, and early evening. Knowing your audience and interacting with them often can help you determine the best times to reach your own online community.

If you live and work on the east coast but your target market and most of your audience is based in California, adjust your timing for online content publishing and interacting accordingly.

The timeliness of your responses is an important part of trust-building online. Leaving questions unanswered for days, weeks, or even longer leaves a bad taste in a customer’s mouth and can dissolve that person’s trust in you.

A timely response is even more important when you (or someone posting for you) make a mistake. Address mistakes as quickly as possible — it can mean the difference between a positive and negative impression of your brand.

Ramon de Leon owns several Domino’s Pizza franchises in the Chicago area. When a customer tweeted a complaint about receiving the wrong pizza, De Leon did more than fix the problem — he posted a tweet, as shown in Figure 4-5, to explain that the correct order was en route and that the store would “wow” her. Then he created a personalized video apology with his store manager. This video, which has been viewed more than 160,000 times, is a stellar example of social media follow-through.

Giving the audience what they want

After you have drawn your audience’s attention, you’re faced with the million-dollar question: how to keep their attention and compel them to action? Crucial to solving this puzzle is how you follow through, though the answer starts with the foundation you lay. This list explains several reasons that people stay connected with you in social networks — why they click the Like button or share your posts:

The content resonates with them. Your content makes them smile or laugh or moves them emotionally.

The content originates from a source they trust. The content was shared by you, a friend or connection on a social network.

The content reflects something about themselves. You may have published the information, but they agree and react to it and share it to reveal a part of themselves.

The content puts them in-the-know. People like to be the “first to know” or to have insider information on special promotions, contests, and other offers. Some also like to be the first of their friends to share this news within their own circles.

Others respond. People like to have things in common with others, and when other people respond to your content, it invites even more responses that continue the conversation and build bonds.

You respond. If people know that you’re right there to acknowledge them when they like or comment on your content, it’s incentive to respond again. People love to be noticed and to feel that they matter.

You give perks. People like to be part of the “in crowd,” and beyond information, you can offer them discounts, coupons, and deals that they receive because they’re connected with you. Plus, they can pass along offers to friends to spread the good feeling all around.

Figure 4-5: This franchise manager and his store manager apologized online for a customer’s bad experience.

The better you know your audience, the more likely you are to post content that people feel connected to — and that they’ll respond to and engage in. Then it’s your turn to be responsive, to engage, and to follow through to build a stronger relationship and give others good reasons to trust you.

Building Trust in Traditional Online Marketing

Before Twitter, there was the e-mail newsletter. Before Facebook Fan Pages, businesses ran online banner ads. Traditional online marketing — like newsletters, banner ads, and e-mail marketing — still exists and also requires a level of trust. Building a rapport between your brand and your customers and prospects builds your business and helps your brand thrive.

Engaging appropriately with the media

Emphasizing social media engagement doesn’t mean that you ignore the importance of the role of traditional media. Being mentioned in the media is still an important part of marketing, and press pages on company websites are filled, for good reason, with the logos representing media outlets such as Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Oprah, Fast Company, Today, and CNN. Television, print magazines, and newspapers still exist and are still powerful.

These days, these media hits often happen because brands do more than send press releases and make cold calls to members of the press. Reporters and producers pay attention to social networks for potential news stories and to find news sources organically. Savvy brands can position themselves in social media to attract the media’s attention, and they can engage with members of the press by following them in social networks to engage them in dialogue, draw their attention to potential news stories, and provide resources including links.

Nurture relationships with your local media and even with national or international media. Find creative ways to suggest story ideas and to position yourself or someone from your team as a topical expert. Incorporate images and video into your online pitches via social media to attract attention. Work to build a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable source for quotes and news leads.

Strongly consider media training for whoever might be appearing on camera or acting as a company spokesperson. Being knowledgeable about your topic doesn’t compensate for a lack of polished media presence. Displaying poor skills in front of the camera can hurt your credibility and even make you look untrustworthy.

Adding engagement to press releases

Traditional press releases are taking new forms because of social media. They can no longer simply make announcements and spew marketing language. A press release must now be part of the conversation in social networks.

With the growth of social media and publishing tools at everyone’s fingertips, the days of editors and producers serving as the gatekeepers of news have passed. Anyone can be a citizen reporter, creating and sharing news with friends, fans, and followers. This situation places reporters — and PR people — in precarious positions if they fail to adapt to the new ways of disseminating news.

Making your press release social is another way to become transparent. The more accessible your company news and information are to the general public, the greater level of trust and credibility you build. To give your press releases a better chance of being seen, and of bypassing the traditional channels of news publishing, you can

Include links to your social networks: These links allow members of the media to engage with your company online. Include links within the press releases that lead to additional content, to even more multimedia, and especially to all the major social sharing networks.

Share them on your blog and social networks: Putting this information on your platforms increases the opportunity for it being seen by your community and spread to other sources who might want to cover it.

Add social sharing tools to every release: That way, readers can share them easily with their connections.

Host them on the web: Most social-media–powered releases are now hosted on the web rather than e-mailed or faxed.

Use short, catchy headlines: Headlines in press releases should make sense, be relevant to readers, and be crafted with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. A headline often becomes the content for your tweet or update with a link to the rest of the release.

Make it multimedia: A press release should contain images (perfect for Facebook and Pinterest) and even embedded audio and video files. Since the releases are hosted on the web, embedding multimedia like this to enhance them is a breeze.

Provide “tweetable” quotes: Content is consumed at a fast pace online. Pull out quotes and excerpts of your releases that have a maximum of 120 characters so that they’re easily shared on social networks, especially Twitter.

When writing a press release, consider the story you’re trying to tell. Storytelling is an important part of engaging in social media. Start there and use the elements of storytelling to convert a press release from a static document into a dynamic start of a conversation.

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Just because your release is more “social” doesn’t mean that you should disregard the best practices of press release writing. Good grammar, proper punctuation, and addressing “the six W’s” of information-gathering — who, what, when, where, why, and how — are still essential parts of any well-written press release regardless of the distribution method.

Use social media release (SMR) tools such as PitchEngine (http://new.pitchengine.com) and PressDoc (www.pressdoc.com) to easily build press releases on the web with embedded social features at an affordable price. These tools are specifically designed to bring journalists and social media together and offer stats so you can determine who has seen your press release.

Soliciting third-party endorsements the right way

Satisfied customers represent gold that’s waiting to be mined. The best way to have them endorse your brand? Ask. Don’t be afraid to request online reviews about you or ratings of your business, product, or service.

Make it worth the effort for people to praise you publicly. When a happy customer raves about you on a social network, be sure to express your gratitude. Share their kind words with your larger fan base. Find a creative way to say thank you.

Lead people to popular review sites so that their praise finds even more exposure, such as

Yelp: www.yelp.com

Google Places for Business: www.google.com/places

Angie's List: www.angieslist.com

Citysearch: www.citysearch.com

Yahoo! Local: http://local.yahoo.com

Positive, unsolicited reviews from consumers at these review sites go a long way toward building your brand’s credibility. Controlling the content of reviews on public sites, however, is impossible.

Never fake a positive review for your own business in a social network or review site. If you get caught and called out publicly, you can instantly lose your credibility and the public’s trust. On a review site, you can be banned; on a social network, you can’t be banned for pretending to be a satisfied customer, but the loss of trust isn’t even remotely worth any perceived benefit.

Assessing Trust and Credibility

You know that you’re trustworthy. You believe that you’re credible. But how does your community feel about you? Having a lot of friends, fans, and followers as well as likes, follows, and repins may seem to be tangible measurements of how people feel about your brand, but they may not tell the full story.

Be sure that the people who are connecting with your brand via social media are truly connecting with you — and will stay connected over the long haul.

Analyzing sentiment and impact

Understanding whether your community has a positive, negative, or neutral response to you and your brand can help you determine how to continually hone your social media engagement approach. How you measure up against competitors in the minds of your online audience is another important factor to assess. You can also benefit from identifying the key influencers who are driving the bulk of the online conversation about you and the general consensus among the most vocal members of your community.

Many tools (either free versions or paid versions that offer free trials or free levels) can help you measure some less obvious aspects of social media engagement. Here are a few that we like:

Sysomos (www.sysomos.com) has a social media monitoring tool, Heartbeat, that measures sentiment and helps track conversations by country, city, or state or by profession or gender. (Pricey.)

SalesForceMarketingCloud (www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com) Formerly Radian6, SalesForce ties in to Google Analytics, Webtrends, and Omniture to gather statistics and determine which online thought leaders are generating the most chatter about you and driving the greatest amount of traffic to your sites. (Pricey.)

PeopleBrowsr (http://rs.peoplebrowsr.com), a lower-cost alternative to the paid services, lets you search by topic, brand, or name. Use it to highlight as many as 1,000 days of Twitter conversations, and filter results by gender, sentiment, community, or location. In Figure 4-6, you can see sample search results for Danielle's Twitter handle — @DanielleSmithTV. (Affordable with a 14-day free trial.)

Simply Measured (http://simplymeasured.com) is fee-based, but you can have free reports e-mailed to you, including a free Facebook Competitive Analysis Report to see what other brands are doing well and a free Klout Audience Report to see how effectively you're engaging with your followers on Twitter. (Paid but offers free reports.)

Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) uses the tagline Like Google Alerts, but for social media. In seconds, this service measures the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media and whether the general sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral. The results also indicate the possibility that the people who are talking about you will do so repeatedly and list the keywords being used in connection with your brand or name. (Free.)

Figure 4-6: Evaluating how people are referring to Danielle on Twitter.

Measuring the amplification of your messages

Hidden behind the noise of social media, competing for attention, is amazing content — your amazing content. Occasionally, you may feel as if you’re standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, shouting your message, asking questions, and sharing an extraordinary story with only this response: an empty echo.

As we discuss earlier in this chapter, the key to hearing more than an echo is to listen. As you move from one social platform to another, as you share an image, as you ask a question, or as you dole out a slice of content that you know is special, you gauge the results.

Did your community like an image 84 times, comment 24 times, and share it 2 times — yet no one responded when you asked whether they had plans for the weekend? The solution is easy: Share another image and try a different type of question.

Though some social networks provide you with insights into how well people are responding to your social media engagement efforts, a myriad of third-party tools can help you measure response rates across your social networks or on the ones that lack built-in tools. Here are a few that we like:

URL shorteners

bitly (https://bitly.com/)

Google URL Shortener (http://goo.gl/)

Ow.ly (http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url)

su.pr (http://su.pr/)

Social media management tools

Buffer: http://bufferapp.com

HootSuite: http://hootsuite.com

Sprout Social: http://sproutsocial.com

Other tools with useful analytics

dlvr.it: http://dlvr.it

PeerIndex: www.peerindex.com

Klout: http://klout.com

To avoid having to simply notice the ebbs and flows of responses when you’re trying to engage, invest in the appropriate analytics tools to more accurately and consistently read how well you’re engaging. These tools can help you determine how to improve the way you engage and in turn improve the results of your engagement efforts.

As you respond, engage, and talk, your customers will see you as an individual, not an entity. You’re humanized. You gain credibility and trust. You win.