It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

What does Twitter mean to your business? With more and more companies including the likes of Dell, Comcast, PepsiCo, JetBlue Airways and Whole Foods using Twitter, we speak with Julio Ojeda-Zapata about his new book, ‘Twitter means business: how microblogging can help or hurt your company’.

In a wide-ranging interview Julio Ojeda-Zapata talks with Justin Hunt, founder of ItsOpen, about:

* Why companies should use Twitter
* Evidence of Twitter increasing sales
* Whether Twitter is applicable to B2B as well as B2C marketing
* Which company is doing the best with Twitter
* How companies should best approach Twitter
* How companies can resource using Twitter as a customer channel

You can hear the interview below.

If you would like to discuss any issues raised by this podcast or are
interested in developing a Twitter strategy for you business, please
contact Itsopen at: 0845 0542299

For more details about the book and to buy a copy please click here.

Listen to the interview:

or download the mp3 (14mb)

Social media is by now a recognised way of keeping in touch with your
customers and business partners. But it also offers a lot of  potential when it comes to finding employees.

Dan Schawbel offers seven secrets to getting a job using social media. Don’t spend too much time on sending out CVs and cover letters, he advises. Instead, get yourself out there: use Twitter; make your LinkedIn profile as attractive as possible; advertise on Facebook. Even – and this is the most off-the-wall suggestion – create a video of yourself and post it  on YouTube.

Schawbel’s view is that in an economic downturn, you need to sell yourself as much as possible. But what of businesses? Are you making the most of social media to find the best people to fill your posts?

While some companies are already looking for candidates through LinkedIn, or using Second Life to conduct recruitment fairs, these activities still only play a small part in most businesses’ recruitment strategies.

It would be foolish to abandon tried-and-tested strategies for recruiting employees in favour of social media. But it’s worth putting a toe in the water. Traditional methods of recruitment, such as advertising in newspapers or hiring recruitment agencies, can be costly, cumbersome and time-consuming. Using social media potentially enables you to cut out the middleman and find the right candidate more quickly.

There’s a good chance that once you’ve started recruiting this way, you won’t look back.

Hidden away in the FT in that quiet week between Christmas and New Year was an excellent article on how large companies and well known brands are engaging in social media conversations. Brand as diverse as Ford and Pepsi are taking the lead in showing the best way to deal with potentially damaging online discussions.

Read the full article here.

Probably few companies have greater need to watch what’s said about them online than IT vendors. I’ve had thankfully few nightmare experiences in the past 15 years, but thinking back, it occurs to me that most of them had to do with computers not working. In a moment of inattention I once bought a peripheral from Dell which I could equally well have bought from Amazon. It never arrived, and led to months of fruitless correspondence with a brand that couldn’t seem to care less. 

Back in 2005 another angry customer posted a widely read rant about his “Dell Hell“, describing what he went through trying to get the company to respond to the problems with his new purchase. He concluded that they just didn’t seem to be listening to their customers. After giving them chapter and verse he gave them this advice: to read blogs, to get active in blogging themselves, and have conversations with consumers.

Well, Dell seems to have taken all this to heart. Three years on the company has a pretty active blog, which it says generates 3.5 million pages views per month. The most recent post uses the platform to hammer the message about its green credentials, something that every company should be doing. Also, check out the December 23 post about how a public tweet led to a casual get-together to discuss virtual worlds.

In addition to its public blog, Dell runs nine official blogs and hundreds of team/departmental blogs in various languages, to which its employees can participate in conversations. Dell also runs a ‘crowdsourcing’ site called Ideastorm, where users can go to post suggestions for changes and blow off a bit of steam – this has generated around 10,000 ideas so far, it says. It is active on Twitter, where it runs 22 separate corporate accounts to help users keep in touch with trends and with each other. It even has a ‘virtual worlds’ thing going, with the Dell Island on Second Life.

Back in the real world, no computer vendor is going to please everyone. But at least Dell is being proactive. By initiating and taking part in public conversations it is taking sensible steps to nurture its image, instead of letting itself be a passive target for complainers.