“Hi, how’s it going?” Person A asked.
“Not too shabby. I’m not looking forward to the snow Wednesday.” Person B replied.
“I’m great today. Did you see the football game last night?” Person A questioned.
“No, I had to work. What a horrible night.” Person B responded.
“Did you see that interception Cassel threw? Glad we traded him away, huh?” Person A said.
Person B quipped back, “If you aren’t going to listen to a word I say, why am I bothering to talk to you in the first place. Good bye.”
Often times, our social interactions online are similar to this demonstration conversation. We fail to appropriately acknowledge what is being said. This blog discusses and illustrates the potential failures, and how these failures can destroy our social media campaigns, and how to proactively stop this from occurring.
First of all, if people comment on something that you say, show the world that you heard. On Facebook, comment about their comments. On Twitter, @theirname mention them back. If one commenter closed down the discussion with his or her comment, and ended the topic (e.g. , they answered a question in which there is only one answer) then thank him or her for answering. There should never be a time that anyone makes a statement, asks a question, or mentions you at all without you having input after. If you’ve never had the chance to have the last word, your time has finally come!
On Twitter there is a great feature called “Favorites”. It allows you to mark a Tweet, and save it for later. Every time someone says, “Thank you” on Twitter, mark it as a favorite tweet. Anytime someone replies to you in a positive light, mark it as a favorite. Let’s say you have 50 positive things being sent to you, or about you, out there in Twitterland. Instead of simply sending people to:
http://www.twitter.com/yourcompany you can send them to: http://www.twitter.com/yourcompany/favorites and they will see all of these tweets. You don’t get much better social proof than a list of 50 different people thanking you!
Your goal is to always forward the conversation. If you have someone responding, do not simply answer a question with a statement, and don’t answer with a question. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Customer Comment: How’s the weather at the store today?
- Wrong #1: Great.
- Wrong #2: Are you planning on swinging by?
- Correct!: The sun’s shining, and the walkways are clean. Planning on stopping by soon? Can you bring me a coffee? –Just kidding!
Obviously, if you own a coffee shop, I wouldn’t recommend requesting a beverage, but otherwise, you could probably get away with it. Don’t be afraid of acting like a social human being. They call it social media for a reason, right? If you were to take your interactions off of the web, and hand people a printed copy, could they read it as a script back and forth, amongst the group? Your goal is to have your interactions look like a dialogue between people, not a monologue or soliloquy. Make sure that you are acknowledging your social media the same way you would if someone was speaking it in front of you.