Tips for Companys on SEO/Social Media and just COMMUNICATION in general.

...or maybe this post should just be called, "Companies who DON'T get IT." Get it? I.T. and it, okay I'm a nerd moving on. I just read a post by Chris Brogan called, "Shut up your helping the customers." Great post, I encourage you to read it. It's basically about a guy who works for a very large fortune 500 company that sells extremely expensive products. The company does a direct mail campaign that excites it's consumer base, and the customers want to interact more with the company online. The guy starts a forum and uses social media to connect with his consumer base and is reprimanded for doing so. On the one had, it's not good to tempt fate or go directly against orders from your boss or upper managements, but on the other hand they should have been more open minded. The story has a few wholes in it, but I think it may have helped if the guy had taken more time up front to discuss this stuff with his bosses. You never know how high up the big 'NO' was coming from, and I'm not sure he was even in the marketing department. On the other hand this story has inspired me to share one of my own little stories.

A Interactive Maketing Strategist was working for a small web design company at the time that we will just call company A, anyway the company wanted to start offering new services for their clients like SEO and social media. Unfortunately they were not terribly prepared for all that this can entail, like holding client's hands and walking them through the scary new territory of communicating directly with your consumers, having to pay for analytics tools, social media  tools, needing more then one person to do the job, not having a copy writer on staff, or understanding that sometimes the client may change their mind and get scared regardless of success or a small set back (like SEO dropping one or two spots on occassion). This brought to mind a particullarily odd circumstance where the client had both an SEO campaign and were just started to wrap their head around social media, starting with a twitter account. Twitter was ironically a huge success (depending on what you consider a success), lots of people who were in said companies target market immediately friended the client's profile. In less then a week they had 400 followers, and a dozen posts with some interesting content communicating about the company's services and products or just answering questions. The following week the client calls to request that twitter is stopped because it is now second on a google search for their name and they have recieved more traffic from twitter in two weekks then in the past month from search engines or direct visitors (thanks to google analytics). Unfortunately for the client people on twitter still talk about them, but no one is their to talk back now. This could have been a great new adventure for them and a great way to find new clients, but the web design company was too scared to let the strategist explain why it could have been a great thing for them and instead repremanded the strategist. In the end ladies and gents these things all take time, patience, understanding and forward thinking bosses, and a well thought out strategy... oh and more often then not A LOT of coddling on the strategist's part.

If you would like to connect with me online, find me on twitter.