Come to our upcoming BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media conference in San Francisco to hear Farmers Insurance, Rogers Communications, Target, Yahoo!, NVIDIA, Hitachi Data Systems, Verizon, and Autodesk share 8 great case studies on corporate social media.
This event is all about how big brands use social media. No agencies, no startups — just big companies sharing what they’ve learned. You’ll get practical, how-to advice on developing your social strategy, scaling your program, driving sales, engaging internal and external audiences, and measuring it all.
You’ll ask questions, discover new ideas, and learn how to make your social media program phenomenal — all in one fantastic afternoon for just $250.
…and you’ll experience a bunch of great case studies, like this one from our BlogWell in Atlanta:
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Numbers from September 2011 show Yelp has more than 61 million monthly visitors who are reading more than 22 million reviews. It’s an incredibly powerful word of mouth community that every day influences where millions of people do business.
How to get more of your fans leaving reviews:
1. Remind your customers
2. Link to your Yelp profile
3. Reply and respond
1. Remind your customers
When was the last time you woke up and said, “Today’s the day I write a review for that business I love!”? For most of us, we just don’t think this way. This is why you need to regularly tell your customers how important their word of mouth is to you. Put signs on your tables, add it to your business cards, put it on your invoices, and remind people on the way out the door. Just keep it simple and don’t be pushy — something like, “Please let us know how we’re doing on Yelp” can make a big difference.
2. Link to your Yelp profile
Even when you’re not openly asking for reviews, you can still drive a lot of fans to them by simply linking to your Yelp profile from your website, your email signature, and your newsletters. And if you’re hesitant because you’re concerned about your current ratings, remember this: Strangers are already going to Yelp first. Pointing your happy customers and loyal fans there means they can add their voice to the conversation.
3. Reply and respond
Like any community, your Yelp page is healthier and better when you’re involved. The more you engage, the more reviews you get (and the higher quality they’ll be). For more on this, check out Yelp’s recommendations on how to participate.
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Topics are the ideas, features, and attention-grabbers you use to give your talkers something to talk about. You should be creating and testing as many as you can, as often as you can, until you find a few that really take off.
What to remember when developing yours:
1. Keep it simple
2. Make it organic
3. Look for the unexpected
1. Keep it simple
Simple topics are easy to share and are much more likely to get repeated than long, jargon-filled ones. Recent favorites to inspire you are IKEA’s “Manland,”JetBlue’s auctioning of seats on eBay, and the library where you can check out a human being. All these topics are great because they’re simple, they’re fun, and they’re easy to tell a friend about.
2. Make it organic
Organic topics are built in to your products. They’re key features, perks, and bonuses that inspire conversations. The best all-time example of this is the flower vase built in to VW Bugs. This simple feature continues to start conversations every day, even though it originally came out in the 1950’s. (Note: VW removed this feature for the 2012 model, which is a topic for a future issue on how to kill a great conversation.)
3. Look for the unexpected
Some of your best topics will come not from you, but from your fans. Watch how people use and talk about your stuff and if you see a great topic emerge (even if it’s not perfectly aligned with your brand message), go with it. Think like Duck brand duct tape when they saw kids creating prom outfits with their tape. They saw a great topic and created a scholarship to encourage other kids to do it, and have since created a whole bunch of new conversations.
This is GasPedal's blog about all things word of mouth marketing. We cover everything from the best word of mouth case studies to the latest research, focusing on the practical ideas you can use to get your fans talking about you.
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Come to our upcoming BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media conference in San Francisco to hear Farmers Insurance, Rogers Communications, Target, Yahoo!, NVIDIA, Hitachi Data Systems, Verizon, and Autodesk share 8 great case studies on corporate social media.
