I hope you have learned a lot in the previous chapters about how to create and sustain engaged face2face connections with customers and potential customers. In these last few chapters, we will focus on the next steps. How do you begin showing your organizational “human side” on a corporate blog? How do you start creating and maintaining online, personalized invitations to connect to your organization’s Facebook account? Where do you begin?
This chapter will answer those questions, Chapter 11 will show you how to measure results, and Chapter 12 will provide an example of a small business that is just starting out.
This chapter focuses on:
• Asking
• Setting goals
• Creating strategy
• Doing the work
Let’s get started!
Often, the best place to start asking questions is with your current customers, potential customers, and people in close proximity to your business. Ask them questions like:
• What they want you to do
• How they’d like to connect with you
• If they like receiving deals via Facebook or Twitter
• How you can better serve them as they connect with you—with your organization, as they use your services, etc.
• What they like or don’t like about your new service or product
Those questions should get you started. How should you ask? There are multiple ways to ask, including person-to-person, focus groups, and surveys.
These days, person-to-person doesn’t necessarily mean being physically present. Communicating person-to-person can mean via email, text message, IM, or a direct message in Twitter. But it’s still directed at a single individual who you know in some context—hence, person-to-person.
Person-to-person asking can actually be as simple as cornering your friends and relatives. Ask them if they like friending organizations online. Depending on the type of organization you have, that could be useful information.
You can also, of course, focus on your customers. Look for active customers—the ones you already recognize, who are in your store or using your services. Online, look for similar types of people—people who are already interacting in some way with you. They’re the ones who frequently Like one of your status updates on Facebook or already leave comments there. Maybe they’re in the habit of retweeting your Twitter posts. These are the people you recognize in some way.
These people are already interacting with your organization, though you might not have thought about it in that way. They’re already engaged.
Ask them things like:
• Do you read blogs?
• Do you leave comments online?
• Do you participate in surveys?
• Do you like receiving coupons via Facebook?
• Do you ever have a question about our organization but don’t want to make a phone call?
• How do you want to connect with us?
• Why do you want to connect with us?
Then, once you have made a semi-direct connection with these people, continue asking them questions. Ask things like: Did you use our service? How was it? Anyone buy that new item? If so, what do you think? For TSCPL, we might ask “What was the last book you checked out, did you like it, and why?” Questions will also jumpstart interactions between your organization and your customers—you will be creating and maintaining face2face connections.
Here’s the deal: If those people interact with you on less serious, short-form questions, you have a better chance of those same customers and contacts being willing to answer longer-form questions when you need a deeper level of input or direction for your organization.
A focus group is a small group of people you gather together to participate in a guided discussion about a particular product or service before it launches or to provide ongoing feedback about your organization. This simple concept can be very powerful.
TSCPL has used focus groups to gather information before we start a website redesign. We’ll hold two to four focus group sessions, with five to 10 people participating in each group. During each focus group session, we will ask questions about our website such as:
• What do you like most about the website?
• What do you not like?
• What doesn’t make sense?
• What are your favorite websites to visit?
• What would you like to do here but can’t?
The answers we receive during the sessions are invaluable to us. We refer back to them during our redesign process.
We look for those active customers mentioned earlier to be our focus group participants. These are active users of our services. Online, we look for frequent Facebook users—Facebook followers who are already actively using the tools (Facebook) and the service (our library). This can be a great way to find people already willing to interact with your organization. If they like commenting on your Facebook status updates, perhaps they’d also be willing to help out in another setting.
Remember, in a focus group setting, you’re not really looking for specific information. You’re looking for reactions and for participants’ thoughts about whatever it is you ask.
Glenn David Blank, an associate professor of computer science at Lehigh University, says to concentrate on these types of results from your focus group:1
• Gathering opinions, beliefs, and attitudes about issues of interest to your organization
• Testing your assumptions
• Encouraging discussion about a particular topic
• Building excitement from spontaneous combination of participants’ comments
• Providing an opportunity to learn more about a topic or issue
Gather this type of information, and you are well on your way to figuring out how to interact with your customers.
Surveys are another way to poll relatively active customers and ask for their help in developing and guiding your organization to the next level. Surveys are an easy way to gather information about specific things. Ask something specific, with simple multiple choice or yes/no answers. Make it quick and simple to increase your chances that customers will complete the survey.
Surveying people used to be a pretty time-consuming activity. Remember those part-time market research jobs at the local mall, where people stand around for hours, looking for specific types of people to pester into answering a few questions? Thankfully, we don’t have to do that anymore. You can easily direct people to fill out short surveys on your website or on your Facebook Page.
Keep your survey short. I wouldn’t advise asking more than 10 questions. The survey should take no longer than five minutes to complete. People generally don’t want to answer 100 time-consuming, detailed survey questions. If it feels like a test, you have definitely lost people. If the survey is short and it seems like you are asking for opinions, you have a greater chance of a good response.
With surveys, you are looking for answers to specific questions and for trends. Here’s what Survey Monkey, a popular online survey tool, suggests about what to avoid while asking survey questions:2
• Avoid leading questions: You don’t want to lead your respondents into answering a certain way based on the wording of the questions.
• Avoid loaded questions: These types of questions work through emotionally charged items like words, stereotypes, and so on. This too can push respondents toward a specific answer choice.
• Avoid built-in assumptions: You shouldn’t ask questions that assume the respondents are familiar with the specifics of it. Include details or additional information if necessary.
• Avoid jargon—use simple language: You should try to use words that are direct and familiar to the respondents. Try not to use jargon or technical concepts.
• Avoid double negatives or double-barreled questions: Double-barreled questions split questions into more than one part, idea, or meaning. The answer choice for each part might have separate meanings to the ideas presented within one question.
After asking, the next most important step to take is to start setting goals. Every project needs goals: business-facing goals and people-facing goals. You’ll definitely have business-facing goals, like earning more profit or helping more people. But you also need goals focused on creating and sustaining ways to connect with your customers—ways to be consistently human in your organization’s interactions with its customers.
Goals for Facebook might include always using business casual language. Maybe you’ll have a practical goal of posting five status updates a week. Those status updates might focus on these ideas:
• Sharing thoughts about a product or your organization’s industry
• Sharing links to new posts on your organization’s blog or videos of how to get value out of a new service
• Responding to comments and replies
• Answering questions as they appear
A major goal for your organization might be to expand your reach in your customer community. At TSCPL, this means getting to know our library customers. To do that, we invite them to friend us in social networks. A large number of people in Topeka and Shawnee County use Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. Because of that, we are sure to actively nurture community in those networks. It’s a great way to connect to our library customers. We make an effort to have conversations with our customers in those settings, just like we do in our building and out in the community. This may encourage more library card holders in the process.
If you’re a business or organization, this might be a way to sell more, sign more people up, and so on—by introducing people to your services, and then by starting, sustaining, and participating in conversations that take place about those services and the issues surrounding them.
Now you have four to five goals surrounding how to create and sustain face2face connections with your customers by using online networks. What’s next? You need to create strategies that help your organization meet those goals.
Creating strategy is simply creating steps that help you get to your end result. This is much like planning a vacation. First you figure out where you want to visit (the goal), and then you figure out all the details (the strategy) that will get you to that relaxing beach!
Here’s an example. Say your goal is to get more Facebook friends. (Facebook actually calls it Likes. YouTube calls them subscribers, and Twitter calls them followers. I’m using the general term friends to describe these connections.) To meet that goal, your strategy might look like this:
• Friend organizations in your service area that have a Facebook presence. Look for partner organizations—preferably partner organizations with a good dose of activity on their Facebook Wall.
• Start conversations with those organizations on their Facebook Pages. If there is a status update, comment on it. Hopefully, other people will comment too and start a conversation.
• On your own Facebook Page, simply ask for more friends!
You can also ask for friends in other ways. For example, if you hold an event, take the first two minutes to tell people about your Facebook Page. Then ask participants to friend your organization.
You’ll also need to figure out who does the work of determining strategy. In our Facebook example, who runs the Facebook Page? Who checks out and friends people? Who answers questions and responds to comments? That’s real work that needs to be done.
Instead of asking for volunteers and crossing your fingers, be sure to assign responsibilities and set timelines and due dates. This way, you’ll be able to measure progress toward your goal and know if the work was done well and in a timely fashion.
How does one measure success? Let’s refer back to our Facebook goal of getting more friends. Success with that goal might be a couple of things. Success, obviously, could mean seeing an increase in Facebook friends, which is easy to count and track. In fact, Facebook Pages can send out a weekly email showing the number of friends gained each week, so growth can be monitored. You can also check out Facebook Insights for your Facebook Page and monitor growth over a longer period of time.
Success for this goal could also mean an increase in awareness of your organization’s products or services. Maybe because you started interacting with people and other organizations via a Facebook Page, those partner organizations mentioned you or your services more regularly than they used to. Increased mentions can potentially be tracked over time. One way to do that would be to set up an alerts feed or subscribe to responders’ Facebook Pages or Twitter feeds, and then keep track of mentions from other organizations.
Success might mean an increase in numbers elsewhere. Maybe more people attended an event because they discovered it through Facebook. To measure that, you’d need to ask how people heard about the event. You can ask and take a quick show of hands, or you might pass out a response form.
Maybe, more people visited your business or used your service because they read about it on Facebook. Again, this is easily discoverable by simply asking how people found out about your organization.
Your final strategy is to figure out what to do next. Hopefully, you will meet that first set of goals. And honestly, even if those goals didn’t fully succeed, you will need to regroup and figure out the next steps to take anyway.
At this point, you are doing great. You have set some reachable goals for your organization, and you have multiple strategies to reach those goals. You have figured out ways to listen. You know how to connect to your customers.
What’s next? Actually starting. And I’m not being funny here. I know of more than one organization that has created detailed plans for a project or has created a great strategic planning document … only to put it in a binder and place it on a shelf, where it then gathers dust until the next strategic planning session a couple of years later.
Want to get those plans accomplished? The best way, many times, is to jump in with both feet and just start. Then, adjust as needed. If you find that the work was too much for one person and you have the resources, add another person to the project. If you find you’re getting less activity than anticipated, trim down. Also adjust for success. Most likely, if you focus on the goals and the strategy you created, you will have thought through many of the major obstacles you might face, so those are more easily navigated.
It is very important that your organization has adequate staffing to sustain face2face goals. Being human online takes time. It’s very similar to connecting with customers in a store setting or at an event. Connecting with customers in person takes time and resources, possibly even training for the floor staff.
Guess what? It’s the same thing online. It will take real, live, full-time staff to interact with your customers online. These employees will need to have excellent customer service and communication skills—not just those 20th-century “written and oral” communication skills asked for in job ads. Twenty-first century communication skills still involve both written and spoken forms, just with a new twist on the modern web. Staff need to know how to write for the web. They need to know how to write in a business casual, inverted pyramid style. They need to know how to connect with people using a status update box that might only provide 140 characters.
Staff doing these jobs should also be familiar with multiple social networks and will need to enjoy connecting with strangers in those settings. This advice works for large and small organizations. If you have the luxury of assigning a team of staff to social media, great! Do it, and let them get started. It’s generally better to have your actual staff do the work of social media—after all, “social media” is nothing more than talking with your customers. Who knows your customers best—an outside social media marketing firm, or your staff?
If you are a small organization, or even a team of one or two people, you face some unique challenges—you have to do all the work. Schedule times for focus on customer relationship building through social media. For example, set aside 15 minutes every morning to interact with customers on Twitter or Facebook. Post some pictures to Flickr or a quick video to YouTube. If you make it a scheduled priority, you will find time for it.
Do these things and you are well on your way to improving your face2face game.
1. Glenn David Blank, “Conducting a Focus Group,” accessed February 14, 2012, www.cse.lehigh.edu/~glennb/mm/FocusGroups.htm.
2. “Writing Survey Questions: Tips for Writing Effective and Relevant Survey Questions,” Survey Monkey, accessed February 14, 2012, help.surveymonkey.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/134/~/tips-for-writing-effective-and-relevant-survey-questions.