This guest article kindly submitted to me by Ann Hawkins ( @AnnHawkins) who attended the recent Travelling Geeks visit to Cambridge where they discussed how small business and corporates are beginning to utilise social networking and social media to properly engage with their clients. Unfortunately I was unable to make that meeting, however I was lucky enough to meet the Travelling Geeks at the Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge the following day (picture below) where we discussed how corporates are gradually realising that social networking allows them to connect with their market in ways that have never been possible before. If you want to learn how it’s done, and wish to have your business realise the true benefit that social networking will bring your organisation then I suggest you read on, there are some great lessons to be learned here…

At a recent meeting with some of the world experts in social media and business it became apparent from the number of examples quoted that businesses not engaged in social networks are missing out.

Every business owner has three choices:

1. You can try to ban your staff from using social networks in working hours but you can’t control what they do in their own time. If your staff are not fully engaged with your business it will show.
2. You can ignore social networks but they won’t ignore you. Customers are talking about you and if you’re not there you won’t know what they’re saying.
3. You can mandate your staff to engage in their usual on-line networks and set up a tracking system that shows up every time your company is mentioned. (try using Social Media Firehose). Train and reward your staff to respond appropriately and your customer service will soar through the roof.

There are hundreds of examples of companies using Twitter effectively, here are a few:

• Zappos (view CEO’s tweets) There are more than 400 Zappos workers on TwitterTwitter. Tony Hsieh, their CEO encouraged employees to Twitter as a way to build a cohesive corporate culture.
• Comcast (view tweets), with a team of 7, listens to what customers say and replies with private tweets to offer help.
• Dell (view tweets) has more than 20 Twitter channels catering to different audiences, including international ones.
• General Motors (view tweets) began Twittering at auto shows to publicize certain events, but then discovered it gained traction when it started engaging in conversations with customers.
• H&R Block (view tweets) originally thought of Twitter as a free and easy way to push messages out to people, but as time went on realized it made more sense to use Twitter to listen to people and respond
• JetBlue (view tweets) use Twitter to communicate with passengers about weather delays and field questions about things like why JetBlue charges $7 for pillows and blankets.
• Kodak (view tweets) began using Twitter as an entertainment and information tool to share personal experiences during the Olympics in China to put a personal face on the brand and build a one-on-one relationship with customers.
• Southwest (view tweets) shares the case of passenger, Christofer Hoff, whose flight was delayed two hours, and then his luggage went missing. While waiting around, he tweeted his displeasure. Southwest responded the next morning with the following Twitter message: “Sorry to hear about your flight –- weather was terrible in the NE. Hope you give us a 2nd chance to prove that Southwest = Awesomeness.” Southwest followed up to make sure his flight home was a better experience. Hoff recounted the experience in a blog post.
• Whole Foods Market Southwest (view tweets) offers $25 gift cards for the tweet of the day, one of which was ‘Stepping into Whole Foods is stepping into a sociological case study.’

Travelling Geeks at the Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge

Jim (”call me Sky”) Schuyler | Susan Bratton | Howard Rheingold | Robert Scoble

About Ann Hawkins:

Ann Hawkins likes win/win situations where everyone gets what they want by helping other people to get what they want. The most exciting evidence of this takes place in Ann’s Inspired Mastermind Groups where business owners share ideas and create new opportunities for each other – it’s brilliant!

You can read Ann’s blog HERE>>>>
You can visit Ann’s website HERE>>>
You can follow Ann on Twitter HERE>>>

Why my “SuperBlog Offer” is just SO good!

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A SuperBlog has special aspects that work in the background to create superb GoogleGoogle rankings, allows you to analyse results and enables you to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. It also contains tools making it easy for other social networkers to tell others about you

It’s a fact: One of the newest and most powerful marketing tools you can use to promote your business is fast-growing social media sites like FacebookFacebook, LinkedInLinkedIn, 4Networking and TwitterTwitter. There has never been a more cost effective way to get your message out to a huge number of potential clients - Your SuperBlog is the centrepiece…

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You may be a technical wizard or a technophobe.

You may have a very big business or a small one. You may like to control everything yourself or hand it over to us to manage. Because our clients are not all the same we have devised four different packages that can quickly put your business in front of millions of potential clients through key social networking sites. People who need your products and services can instantly and effortlessly connect with you. A Superblog is very different to the free blogs that many people use. It has all the features of a web site and can actually replace a website in many instances.

What is a SuperBlog?

A SuperBlog has special aspects that work in the background to create superb Google rankings, allows you to analyse results and enables you to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. It also contains tools making it easy for social networkers to tell others about you

• It’s quick
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If it’s so good, why do we give it away for free?

It’s true, Ian McKendrick has been known on occasion to give away SuperBlogs for FREE! Ian frequently gives special deals to attendees of his Social Networking seminars who place their SuperBlog order at that event. You can find an up-to-date list of  Ian’s events HERE>>> Attendees are given details of a secret subscription page where the installation cost of any SuperBlog Starter is HEAVILLY DISCOUNTED!  The only condition is you must use our hosting service. Our hosting service is excellent value, which not only gives you total control of your blog, but access to a huge range of awesome features for managing your blog and promoting your business. Details of these features are available HERE>>> If you would like to take advantage of this amazing offer then come along to one of Ian’s events, you can find all of his speaking event details HERE>>>

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Installation

The world of blogging is changing at an increasingly fast pace and so we’ve done all the research and will install your Superblog with all the features for the functions you need it to do. We’ll also keep you up to date as new features are developed.

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Free blogs are restricted to only a handful of designs. A SuperBlog gives you the choice of hundreds of designs and for a small fee we’ll even customise it to match your branding. There’s no need to install, setup or configure any templates, we do all of that for you as part of our service.

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The growth of Social Networking for business is phenomenal and the real value of using a SuperBlog as part of your marketing strategy is to make it easy to link to Social Networking sites like Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn etc. SNO is part of the service we provide that ensures visitors to your blog can quickly and easily send links to each page, each article, and even each comment on your blog.

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Our SuperBlog subscribers have exclusive access to our SuperBlog Support Centre where our team of blog and WordPressWordPress experts are waiting to solve any problems our customers encounter. There’s nothing wastes more time, or causes more frustration than trying to find answers to your problems over the Internet. Our experienced team has all the answers and are ready and waiting for your support questions. We are committed to delivering exceptional customer service which means our customers are able to spend more time reaping the benifits of their investment.

FREE training (coming soon)

Each SuperBlog subscriber will have free access to the SuperBlog Forums where users can post questions or ask advice from our support team and other customers in our SuperBlog community. Over the coming months we are setting up a SuperBlog Training Site where we will be publishing training videos that will take the complete novice through to becoming fully competent SuperBlog experts. Our training videos will be fun, short, to the point and aim to get you to where you need to be in the quickest and simplest way possible. Access to this rich, wonderful resource will be completely free to all customers hosting their SuperBlogs with us. In the meantime you might like to consider using one of our Silver or Gold Managed SuperBlog Services.

At last, after many months of planning and hard work I am proud to announce that we have released the first module of our Social Networking training courses, the overview for the entire course. When I get more time I will tell you all about everything we’ve been up to and how we have got to where we are.

In the meantime, here is a link to the course overview so you can find out what to expect when we finish this project in the next few weeks. 

LINK TO COURSE OVERVIEW

During testing we had many requests from people wishing to gain access to the courses as we produced them. Due to this popular demand we have decided to set up a pre-order special deal for those interested, so if you would like to be one of the first to be able to download the course materials – hot off the press – then please click the following link:

PRE-RELEASE SPECIAL DEAL – ONLY £40