YouTube Done Right!

At this point everyone has seen and fallen in love with the Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign. For anyone who’s not had the pleasure of seeing this become the archetype for social media campaigns, here’s a blog I wrote a few weeks ago to get you up to date! Old Spice is now seeing the fruits of their labor with sales doubling. Congrats Old Spice and Isaiah Mustafa (the Old Spice guy)!

We Will Always Remember @IvyBean104

The oldest tweeter, Mrs. Ivy Bean of England, passed away last night. Mrs. Bean (isn’t she cute?!) had 56,000 followers on Twitter and was an active Facebook member, as well. What she taught us at Step Ahead Inc. is that social media can be accessed and used by all ages, all over the world, and that in itself is a very powerful thing! Ivy, we will miss you and I will forever use you as my example when friends say “I don’t get twitter, it’s hard to use!”

Move Over Brangenlia, The New “It” Couple is Amazbook!

This is what the headlines would read if this blog was on OK! Magazine or People! Amazon and Facebook are partnering up to provide their customers with the most customized experience. You can link your Facebook account with your Amazon account, allowing the site to give you recommendations based on your interests and recent activity.

*** I would like to state that I do not read trashy magazines regularly but, come on, it’s beach season, people!

Top Secret Facebook Tricks Everyone Should Be Using

Have you ever wanted to “dislike” a friends’ facebook status or better yet “love” it? What about hide a status update from a certain someone or a group of certain someones? The day that I learned how to “tag” a friend in my personal status changed my life (pathetic, I know)! Here’s [a list] on how to do all those things and so much more.

Can’t Find Your Friends? There’s an App for That!

Face2Face is a new smart phone app that helps you to find out if your social networking friends are close to you and then allows you to connect with them. It doesn’t give you an actual location for these friends so privacy is not an issue … yet. It will be interesting to see if they partner with Foursquare or Gowalla and what that could do for location-based social media. The app is free, so will you download it?

LOL: Why Are You Calling Me a Little Old Lady?

It feels like today we can find a way to abbreviate anything! At a friend’s wedding (omg, how cute are they?) this weekend I could not even count how many times I heard someone use the slang “obvi” for obviously. What we don’t realize is some of our new slang actually has alternative meanings. Here are some [common abbreviations] that already had meanings before the days of Facebook and Twitter. These will start your week with a laugh, obvi!

Twitter Joins the Social Buying Bandwagon

The premise is very similar to Groupon (insert link); Twitter is offering a daily deal that you can take advantage of by following @earlybird Exclusive Offers. The deals are time, and sometimes quantity, sensitive and will be posted directly on their Twitter account. The deals could be on gadgets, apparel and even events.  The deals will be nationwide with the goal being to make them more city-specific in the future.

Geolocation Is Boomin’

Foursquare has teamed up with IFC, the Independent Film Channel, to create a travel guide called “The IFC Always On. Slightly Off. Guide to America.” They’re looking for their fans to submit places that are slightly off to add to the guide. The top 100 submissions will be added and then you have the chance to win the “Slightly Off” badge from Foursquare. Fun! More here.

The wait is over! Starbucks will start providing free WiFi beginning July 1. Click here to see everything the Starbucks Digital Network has to offer to its loyal caffeinated patrons.

Would you like to be able to check out of your Foursquare locations? So does Robert Scoble, read his blog on other ways Foursquare can improve their growing social media network.

Martha Stewart has left the kitchen and entered the world of social marketing. If you are a fan of her cupcakes you might enjoy a taste of her social media tips to promote and grow your business.

One of the most interesting developments has been the creation of a fake BP Twitter feed, BPGlobalPR, now with more than 163,000 followers and retweets galore thanks to its dry wit (“Investing a lot of time & money into cleaning up our image, but the beaches are next on the to-do list for sure.”) and tweets dripping with sarcasm (“Adopt a BP oil plume! $25 makes you 100% responsible for an oil plume and a ‘bpcares’ shirt!”).

And don’t forget YouTube, home of videos taking BP to task for its reaction to the oil spill. My favorite: BP Spills Coffee.

But BP certainly isn’t the first company to take a beating for its missteps. Lest we not forget Toyota just a few months ago and a bevy of auto executives from Detroit taking a private jet to Washington, D.C., to ask for a government bailout.

Unfortunately, these recent examples won’t be the last. But, today a reputation is destroyed in the time it took me to type this paragraph. (140 characters)

Before your company barely has a chance to catch its breath and craft a statement, blogs are buzzing, Twitter is tweeting and Flip cameras are rolling for a satirical YouTube video. Truly, your only course of action is to be as ahead of the game as you can be. This isn’t the time to say “no comment,” buying a couple hours for the staff to set up a Twitter account and a Facebook page.

In this day of social media and the instantaneous news cycle, you have to stay one – better make that two – steps ahead. If these events teach PR people anything, it’s to cover all your bases and that includes social media.

The new version of TweetDeck allows users to set up columns to monitor Google Buzz and Foursquare updates and allows you to add those profiles as accounts. In the Google Buzz column, users can “like,” comment and even email contacts directly from Tweetdeck. We’re very excited about the Foursquare column, which allows users to view updates in real time, see venue information (if they have specials, who’s there now), check in from a venue, insert a shout, view user badges and more! This will make Foursquare much more useful, easy and top of mind for Twitterers.

If that wasn’t enough to get you excited about the new version of Tweetdeck, they also added global filters, video uploads and update scheduling. Global filters allow you to create a filter to hide any messages that include keywords you don’t want to see, so your columns won’t be full of Justin Bieber updates, that is, unless you have Bieber Fever You can also now take a video with your Webcam and upload directly to Twitter, as well as schedule updates. Hallelujah! While other services allow you to do that, having it on Tweetdeck will keep you from having to log in to some other program if you’ve got a quick one you don’t want to forget about.

Have you downloaded the new version of TweetDeck? If not, visit www.tweetdeck.com to download it today. Let us know what you think!

Social media tools allow businesses to respond quickly to issues and complaints, reach out directly to customers and showcase their level of support to the online community. A company that is doing a fantastic job of using Twitter as part of their customer support arsenal is Comcast Cable. In 2008, Frank Eliason, a customer service manager at Comcast decided to reach out to customers via Twitter, and the company hasn’t looked back since. Eliason’s twitter account, @comcastcares, supplies Comcast customers with the immediacy and personal attention they seek.

I experienced this phenomenal customer service first hand. Last week, after receiving my Comcast bill in the mail, I decided to shop around for prices on cable and Internet. I found a great deal with DIRECTV and called Comcast customer support to see if they could match it. They said no!

Frustrated, I turned to Twitter! Later that evening, after 9 p.m., I sent a tweet to @comcastcares, stating that I was thinking of switching to DIRECTV, but wanted to stay a Comcast customer, and could they help me out. About 10 minutes later, I received a tweet back from @comcastcares, asking me to email all the details to a Comcast customer service agent. I immediately emailed them all the details of my account and what DIRECTV would offer.

The next night a customer service agent from the local Comcast customer service office called me and offered to lower my rate even more than DIRECTV would! I was completely surprised and very happy with the news. After the phone call, I tweeted about how much I loved Comcast and how I was going to stay a loyal customer, and now a whole blog is dedicated to this short but sweet Twitter interaction.

Am I happy with Comcast? Yes. Would I have switched to DIRECTV if they hadn’t sent that tweet? Yes, I had my appointment all set up.

This just goes to show that when considering adding social media to your marketing and public relations department, don’t forget it’s a great customer service and customer retention tool, as well. Have you had any customer service interactions on Twitter?

For our latest promotion, we decided to take the idea of silly/fun hashtags (a way to categorize tweets on Twitter) that often pop up and turn that concept into a contest, as well. Since they’re a telecommunications company, we thought what if we asked people who they would call – past or present, living or dead – if they had a magic phone. We turned #magicphone into the hashtag.

A blog post on the company’s site noted that at two random times during a 24-hour period we would choose the person who had tweeted #magicphone closest to that time and award them a Kindle, thus, the contest.

Well, as you may or may not have seen, #magicphone really took off. However, after a staff post-mortem of the promotion and conversations with several Twitter buddies, we realize we may have created an unintended annoying side effect especially for locals in Charleston (where #magicphone got started): filling up your Twitter account with a lot of #magicphone posts.

So we wanted to issue a #magicphone apology on behalf of Step Ahead, Inc. We realize now that the way we chose to select the winner (by selecting a random time) encouraged people to spam #magicphone over and over in the hopes they would land on the right time. Creating a bunch of spammy repeating posts was certainly not our goal.

We wanted people, if they were interested, to tweet it once or twice, tag two others, and be done with it. But instead, lots of people just posted the same tweet over and over and over again. If you were following multiple people doing that, your Twitter account quickly filled up with #magicphone.

Sooo…. we’ve decided that for future promotions like this we’ll allow folks to enter once per day only via Twitter and hopefully reduce the spammy tweets so it’s a bit more manageable – and fun, like we intended. We’re all learning as we navigate the ever-changing world of social media and we feel like every time we do a promotion and tweak and refine, we’re helping our clients have the best social media presence they can have.

Overall, though, Magic Phone was a success, sending more than 4500 people to our client’s Web site and exposing them to their products. Heck, I even got Trista Sutter (oh come on, you know she was The Bachelorette!) to tweet it!

I hope that helps make up for our mistake, Charleston Twitterers. Please know we did not intend to be annoying and never want to aggravate our best Twitter buddies.

So if you see #magicphone again, don’t worry. Hopefully, you’ll only see it a couple of times and you can choose to participate or not without a disruption to your Twitter day.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

FourSquare is a location-based application that you run on your smart phone that allows users to “check-in” when they are out and about. Headed to Publix? Check-in. Out with the guys at the neighborhood pub? Check-in. It definitely appeals to the exploratory and competitive nature of people. It’s like a combination game + communication tool.

FourSquare not only sends out a message on Twitter every time someone checks into a new location, it rewards users by declaring the most frequent traveler to a particular location the “mayor” and awards fun “badges” for checking in often. Additionally, FourSquare allows users to see which of your friends have checked in recently near your current location.

Some smart business owners are beginning to see the benefits already, especially restaurants, retailers, attractions, etc., of driving traffic to their business. With a few simple techniques, you too can use FourSquare to your advantage. Here are a few ideas to get you going:

1. Reward the Mayor – Offer the current “mayor” of your business a perk of holding that position. Maybe it’s a free dessert with every entrée they purchase or half price on all haircuts. To retain their position they will have to come in often, spend money and hopefully bring friends. And maybe others will “check in” more often to try to become the new mayor.
2. Encourage New Clients – The first time a customer “checks in” to your location, offer them a deal or special as a thank you for stopping by.  Something like a free coffee refill the first time they try a new café would encourage new business.
3. Build Traffic – Need your booth to look busy at the next big trade show? Enter everyone who stops by and “checks in” into a drawing for a great prize.
4. Work Together – Gather a few local organizations and create a Scavenger Hunt for the FourSquare crowd. People enjoy using technology to have a good time, and bonus if there’s a prize at the end! You may even get a little local attention!
5. Work the Tips – Use the tips section of the FourSquare app to announce specials and promotions. Users feel like they are being let in on a special deal.

The best part is that FourSquare now supports these “check in” offers. They want you to use their service to build your business, so they’ve invited you to submit your special offers to them and they’ll show them to people who “check in” near you. Here’s a great example from a Coffee House in North Carolina who’s offering a special to anyone who checks in at their location.

If you have a business and still have questions visit FourSquare’s Business page or give us a call to help you make the most of FourSquare.

What creative way could you use FourSquare to promote your company?

We picked Meghan as January’s social media star, because she’s on the front lines of journalism embracing all that social media can do for this industry. She “gets” it where so many media outlets continue to struggle.

Meghan started the WMBF Facebook page in August 2008 with only 10 fans, but has grown the page to over 10,000! Daily, she manages multiple social media accounts for WMBF, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and, one you may not have heard about, Bubbletweet. Here is what Meghan had to say about social media:

What was the first social media technology you used?
Facebook. Over the years, it’s slowly become the No. 1 way I can keep a personal connection with my family and friends back in my hometown of York, Pa.

What is your favorite social media tool?
Definitely Twitter. Believe it or not, I was actually against getting a Twitter account, because I didn’t see the point in posting to the world what I was doing 24/7. Now it’s one of the first things I check on my Blackberry when I wake up – to see who’s doing what and what topics are making news in the Web world.

How have you used social media for your business/company and how has it benefited?
In all honesty, it’s one of the most important tools I use as both a journalist and as a Web producer. Social networking takes news to a whole new extreme – it allows us to see who’s doing what, what issues are important to our viewers, and really allows us to make those important connections with those who keep close tabs on our news product.

Our Facebook fan page has just exceeded 10,000 fans – many of which were gained in 2009. That’s an outlet where we can interact with our fans with a “Question of the Day” and post controversial news stories that we know will draw a response from the public. It also allows us to strengthen the push-pull from social networking sites to WMBFNews.com.

Twitter is another – I can’t tell you how many news stories we’ve broken because of Twitter and how many relationships we’ve built with legislators, community leaders, businesses and organizations because of the exchange of a few tweets. If we can’t pull any news stories off of Twitter, it at least helps us get our brains pumping to come up with new, fresh news content for our shows.
On the flip side, we can keep better track of our competition this way.

How have you seen TV news change since you started in the profession with regard to social media?
It has exploded! I can remember when we had 20 fans on our WMBF News Facebook Fan Page and 100 friends on our MySpace page. We’ve been nursing our social networking sites since we first launched in August 2008 and now depend on it for comments on controversial stories that really affect our viewers or our market drivers. Now, you’ll see a “Facebook Question of the Day” on each of our newscasts – and a big push to become a fan of WMBF News either on Twitter or Facebook.

What role do you see social media playing in TV news in the future?
I see it as a way to gather news stories, build the WMBF News brand, draw people into our product, interact with the community and share breaking news when it happens, as it happens.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?
Ha – it feels like 24 hours a day! It’s hard to gauge because my TweetDeck is always open, I’m always fiddling with UberTwitter on my phone when I’m away from my desk and always checking out Facebook. It’s a part of the job!

How do you incorporate it into your day so it’s not a time waster?
It’s hard! I make sure that when I’m at work – that’s what I’m on Twitter or Facebook for – just work. When I go on dinner break, am heading out to do a story or am on my own time, that’s when I hop on my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.

What’s your best tip for using social media for business?
Use it as just another tool to better your product and your overall image. Don’t ignore the fact that your viewers or clients are interacting with you on a “virtual” level – it’s the perfect time to draw people in! Engage, interact and don’t ignore!

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is underutilized that you would like people to know about?
This is where I plug BubbleTweet, I do believe! I think BubbleTweet is an AWESOME alternative to Tweets if you have a webcam. It’s been a cool way to take people behind the scenes during a newscast, break news stories on a more personal and visual level and to show people that the news is more than just TV.

Where can people find you online and via social media?
www.twitter.com/wmbfmegmiller
http://www.facebook.com/meghanmillerwmbf