How Capable Blog Started

Four years ago I started this blog. Capable People was young and acquiring its leads very much by word of mouth (which it still does, of course). I was researching ways to increase the visibility of our corporate website, get it higher up search engine rankings, more visitors, and so on – for fairly obvious reasons. I think my research started by googling a phrase something like “how to get more visitors to your website”, then trawling through what came up. Anyway, a recurring theme was “get a blog” so, on a whim, I did. That lifted the lid off Pandora’s Box somewhat as I then immediately needed to populate it with something – but what? Back to google … “the do and don’ts of blogs” (or something). Rudimentary though this research was, it actually gave me a useful set of guidelines within about 30 minutes that I still use today. I followed the same path when I started using twitter too, although this continues to be very much a work in progress. We also have a LinkedIn discussion group, but we do not use Facebook.

Rules is rules

The main point I am making in this post is that there are rules (or established conventions, to be more precise). Following the rules make it more likely that social media will work for you, while ignoring or breaking the rules may be worse than not using social media at all. In social media we have a newish vehicle by which companies can interact with their customers or user group. The vehicle has rules and conventions that are established by the user group, and companies have to understand and accept this. So rule 1 is that the company doesn’t make or dictate the rules. Any attempt simply to use your blog and twitter feed as a direct advert for your services will be rejected. You are, in effect, inviting yourself into the virtual social lives of your user group, and they will tolerate your presence only up to the point that you start to become a nuisance, and being a corporate nuisance in the world of social media is a very dangerous thing to be

It has to “add” something

Let’s get one thing straight, adverts are adverts. Adverts have been around for a while and we all know what they are. Corporate websites are the same. More or less an on-line advert for the day job. Anybody who thinks integrating social media applications as part of the same mix is on completely the wrong page. That is not how it works. Let’s start with blogging. If you think you can just cloak an advert for your services under the cover of a blog article, forget it. Few people are so stupid that they can’t see through it, and nobody likes being talked to like they are stupid. Blogs have to be interesting, funny or valuable in some way, preferably with genuinely original content and well written. The rules of blogging are quite straightforward, actually

The best uses of twitter, on the other hand, in my opinion anyway, is where the company actually tries to use twitter to add something to the way they interact with the customer. The best examples I have come across recently are @DellCares and @DeltaAssist. These corporate entities actually use twitter to pick up rapidly on gripes and grumbles of customers (like me) not only to respond to them, but also to actually resolve the problems via Direct Messages. For example, I have changed flights with Delta using twitter alone, and had a faulty printer replaced by Dell again simply via 2 or 3 tweets. They don’t use twitter merely as a means of sweeping cyberspace for gripes and then passing them on to the normal complaint handling people, they actually pick up the problem and DEAL with the problem at one fell swoop. The first time this happened to me (Delta) I thought it was incredible. I was on a KLM code share to the USA and found that everything KLM managed to screw up, I could tweet @DeltaAssist to get sorted, even in transit. KLM had no such equivalent process. Their twitter account merely routed you to a number you could spend the best part of a day on and still not get a result. Since then I have found the same smartness applies to @Dellcares

Anyway, the point is that social media CAN play a highly effective part in the customer relationship, but it has to ADD something. Merely using it to repeat or duplicate something that happens on your website, well, does that really add anything? I don’t think so

The final observation I will make about social media (from a commercial perspective) is that it tends to be quite fair with you. You get out of it about as much as you deserve, by and large. I think that’s a good thing