In a recent study, only 14% of customer tweets sent to a brand received a response. That is like not picking up the phone when a customer calls, or worse, hanging up on them.

Brands everywhere are missing an opportunity to use the power of social in the way it was intended. This reality is underscored by another study that showed 50% of people would no longer consider buying a brand that didn’t respond to their feedback on social media. However, in a study published in 2011, 83% of people who did get a response from a brand after a complaint said they loved that the company responded.

What a missed opportunity. If you simply respond, you are likely to get a brand advocate. Not responding will cost you customers.

Knowing how to respond to a complaint is a challenge that most brands are not even addressing. They are using social media as they use all other media: as a megaphone, or as I referenced recently, one-to-many marketing. This is challenging to brands because they are very comfortable in one-to-many land. They understand it and know how to do it and know what result to expect. Except with social media, the audience has a megaphone too. In fact, each member of the audience (or the “many”) has a megaphone and when used, it can scare the daylights out of a brand.

It is very easy to come back from a stumble because the premise of social media is to have a dialogue. And the challenge with this is that the thought of having a dialogue with a brand is awkward. You tend to feel like you are talking to a bar of soap, and that’s weird. But this isn’t the case with an employer brand, because an employer brand should be about the people. Employer brands are all about the people who develop, make, design, and package a bar of soap. It should feel more personal and human. This is where employer brand has a big leg up on consumer brands in the social sphere. Yet, in many cases, employers are not taking advantage of this at all.

Today, employers are far too frequently using social media as another avenue to post jobs and perpetuate the post-and-pray mentality. keep reading…

I hear from clients a lot asking me “What’s next?” How can we get better at reaching the right person at the right time? How should we optimize our messaging to appeal to passive candidates? Millennials?” Before we talk in depth about the one:me, individualized, personalized market that’s next, first understand where we were and where we are to get a better sense of where we will be.

For a very long time, in the marketing world, we have lived, very comfortably in the one-to-many marketing space. keep reading…

Google+ launched over the summer for individuals, and will soon roll out tools for brands. If you already have a social strategy, you may be shrugging your shoulders or even ignoring this new tool. Because, why is Google+ any different than Facebook or LinkedIn? The answer is as simple as the modest circle.

One of the key differentiators of Google+ is the way you can group people or brands into Circles. This is no different from an individual’s ability to group friends on Facebook. The difference is that on Facebook fan pages or LinkedIn Groups, a brand cannot segment fans into groups. They are all fans. With Google+, a fan is not just a fan. In Google+, a fan can be so much more.

Breaking Down Social Audiences

In the social media landscape there are typically three types of followers or fans. They are: keep reading…