Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [41]
• Talk about your community. If you’re Ford Motor Company, show people who are excited about their Focus Hybrids. If you’re Kodak, show off photos your users have taken with your products. Talk about them, not you, though.
• Post information that’s useful to that community. If you create project management software, share articles about better ways to manage meetings. If you’re a soap company, share posts about how to make an at-home spa experience.
• Share photos of community members. If you host face-to-face events, make a point of asking permission to post photos of the event on the web, and then share photos from your big unveiling party or your customer appreciation day event. The more people who see themselves, or people just like them, the better.
• Share how-to information about your products and services. If you sell cooking supplies, offer recipes. If you sell legal services, maybe you can share best practices about how to prepare for a meeting with your team.
The number of posts for a community manager type should be more frequent than it might be for most other roles. This is because the community manager encourages community engagement. However, a caveat exists: Don’t post garbage. If you have nothing interesting to post, don’t waste the attention in people’s streams.
Comments by community manager types are usually the bread and butter of experiences. If you look at Scott Monty’s posts, you can see that he engages a lot of time in the comments section. On Facebook, I observed that he was equally as active. On Twitter, Bill Gerth and the @comcastcares team is quite active. They use it as a customer service channel.
Comments show your buyers that you care about their opinions. Comments give your customer a voice. They allow you to speak off-message and yet bolster the message. They also show a very human side to your business, and this is worth its weight in gold.
That’s one last detail I’d like to bring up: Community management as a role is a strange mix. It’s part promotional (using PR and communications), part marketing (sharing offers and deals), and a strong part of customer service (helping customers get what they need). If you do only one of these three functions, you’re not likely serving your customers or users in the best way.
Online Store
If you’re the owner of an online (or online-mostly) store, using a service such as Google+ is a great way to be the “online shopkeeper” outside of your e-commerce-heavy environment. If you think of your store as a well-tuned system that helps guide people toward closing a purchase, you wouldn’t want to blur that with too much social networking interaction. (Although you might consider installing the Google +1 button on all your products.) Therefore, if you spend some time on social networks such as Google+, you might find people to interact with who might be seeking what you sell. The following are ideas for the type of content the online store owner might post:
• Post product demos of things you sell, if that makes sense. If video would create a better demonstration, post video. If not, post photos.
• Post interesting ideas or serving suggestions for your products. If you sell pens, show interesting art made by the pens.
• Post profiles and interviews with the owners. The more people see who’s behind the store, the more trust they’ll feel in making purchases. You buy from people you “know,” even if your mind sometimes stretches that “know” a little bit.
• It might be interesting to try live product demonstrations in Hangouts. A video I shot of my favorite carry-on bag amounted to more than 50 sales and counting via affiliate marketing. You might find similar success selling via a Hangout.
In most cases, your time on Google+ doesn’t need to be long to be effective. You might post information