Pt. III: Engagement and Fulfillment

More Sales through Better Search and Engagement

Your site is optimized, the page descriptions in your search results are attractive and now you're seeing an upturn in traffic on your site...but where are the sales? 

If you're getting people to your site and you're not seeing an increase in clicks on your calls to action, there might be a problem or two:

• Your calls to action aren't obvious
• Your site is too confusing in general
• Your content isn't compelling
• Your product isn't interesting/good value

I know, they're all bitter pills to swallow, but any of them might be true.

Web pages, like newspapers, have a “fold.” What appears on a user’s screen when the page first loads is considered to be “above the fold.” The rest of the page is “below the fold.”

The most popular Web sites don’t have a “below the fold.” And of the sites that have longer landing pages, the most successful have a prominent, easy to see, call to action above the fold.

A call to action is just marketing-speak for the #1 thing you want your site visitor to do. On Google’s home page, there’s only one thing to do: search.

Does your Web site make it clear what I should do when I land on its front page? A lack of direction causes confusion, and confusion causes Web searchers to click their “back” button and return to their search results.

Are your menus arranged in an order that Web users are familiar with. Most users will expect Contact Us and About Us to be at the right hand side, with Home on the left. How about the rest of your page? If a user isn’t being directed to do something, and they can’t easily figure out what they want to do for themselves, they will leave the site and go to a competitor.

Statistics show that customer loyalty is less about delivering great customer service than it is about being the first service provider.

So get your call to action front and center. Make it obvious what you want your site visitors to do, and they'll probably do it.

If you're not creating your own content you will want to change that -- you don't have to write it yourself, but collecting non-unique, non-exclusive articles from content farms doesn't help your SEO, and most of these articles are so jammed-full of keywords that they're unreadable. They're not written by subject matter experts, and they're not written by someone with your best interests at heart. If you can write your own content, that's the best solution. The next best solution is to have an expert write it for you. You, and nobody else. Exclusive, shareable, compelling content is what you're looking for.

Put yourself in the position of a reader -- do you want giant articles with nothing but text, or do you want an easily digestible "Top 5" list? Looking at this article, I'd have to admit: irony isn't dead.

Finally, all the marketing in the world can't save a bad product, or compensate for a product whose price is mis-aligned with its perceived value. Would you buy a radio alarm clock for $500? Or a bottle of water for $20? No matter what marketing you throw at those products, you're unlikely to sell very many. The flip-side of that coin is a well-priced product that has limited appeal. A $0.59 bottle of water probably won't sell at an event where bottled water is being given away for free -- ordinarily $0.59 might be a good price, but when it's competing with free...

Content isn't king. Content that can be searched and found, and which is compelling and easy to share, is your goal. Content is the power behind the dual thrones of search and social.

So go connect with your visitors, engage with them, give them every reason to be advocates for your business and they will be.

Pt. II: Attraction

More Sales through Better Search and Engagement

So you read More Sales through Better Search and Engagement Pt. I: Search, you made some tweaks, and you feel like your site is search optimized now. Good work!

Once your site places well in search engine results, the problem isn't placement, it's attraction.

Showing up in the first page or three of search engine results ought to get your site some organic search traffic. But now that all eyes are on you, why aren't you getting that traffic?

Let's take a look at what search engines show to searchers. After searching for "flat panel television repair" this is what Google showed me:

For most searchers, it's the few lines under each result that will earn you clicks or get you skipped over. For most sites, this text comes from the first paragraph of the content on the page. Attraction in search results is about grabbing the attention of readers, and giving enough information for readers to want to read more. It should give enough information that searchers know that your site is the right site for them.

In the Attraction phase, the user will select the results that they think best meet their needs, and if no results look like they're suitable, the user will go back and search with different search terms.

Just like dating, not everyone is looking for the same thing, and what's attractive to one person is not going to be attractive to another. When it comes to online search, the same thing applies. Attraction depends, to some degree, on what searchers are looking for. A searcher looking for information on wild flowers may not be attracted to a site that discusses growing orchids in hot-houses. The trick, if there is one, is to know your audience. Know what they're looking for, and engage with them on their terms.

Simply looking at what your customer-base might search for if they were going to buy your product or service isn't enough. You need to make your pages attractive to users who simply want to be better informed, or who might want to alert their friends to something. For instance, users looking for information about wild flowers might be looking for trails and meadows where wild flowers might be abundant, how to plant a wild flower garden, how to make wild flower arrangements, how to remove wild flowers from your lawn without killing the grass...it's a big list of questions that users might have; and while you can't answer all of them, your site might want to provide links to resources that can answer the questions you don't.

Attraction isn't so much about giving your audience what they want, nor is is about making your audience want what you're giving -- it's about finding the audience that wants what you have, and engaging with them to make that audience grow.

Next: Engagement -- Are you dancing in the spotlight, or a deer in the headlights?

Pt. I: Search

More Sales through Better Search and Engagement

It's confusing. Your Web site ranks on page one of several Google searches, you've placed a Google ad, and yet your company isn't seeing any extra revenue.

First, it's no small feat to get listed on page one of a google search. Nice work.

Second, you need to be familiar with the phases of the search satisfaction process. And if your prominent search position isn't doing it for you, you need to know where the disconnect is happening.

There are four phases of the search satisfaction process:

• Search
• Attraction
• Engagement
• Fulfillment

In Search, users enter a keyphrase and is presented with results. That's all that happens.

The user then moves into the Selection phase by choosing the result that they think will best suit their needs. If none of the results look appealing, they loop back through the Search phase, changing the keyphrase in the hope of improving the results.

Once the user selects a result and is taken to the Web site, they go into the Engagement phase. If the Web site isn't interesting, the user will loop back through Selection and choose a different Web site to go to. If none of the Web sites are engaging, the user eventually goes back to Search and enters a new keyphrase.

In the Fulfillment phase, the user clicks on one of the calls to action on your site and makes a purchase, shares a blog post, registers for a service or...whatever it is you want them to do.

In this guide I'm going to take you through the steps of search satisfaction, and show you how to improve your chances of taking your customer to the next step.

Step 1.
Search. The...final...frontier...
These are the voyages...of the Website...Insert Name Here...its continuing mission, to explore strange new keywords, to seek out new sites and new blog comment sections...to boldly go...where no bot has gone before.

As any thirty-five year old man living in his parents' basement will tell you, these aren't the words that form the introduction to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Of course, that guy's also going to insist that Donnie Darko is the deepest most meaningful movie in history, and if you disagree, you just didn't understand it. Seriously, you're going to want to punch that guy.

However, it's likely that that guy can tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about Search Engine Optimization. You would probably only understand every fifth word, though.

As important as SEO is, not all search results are created equal. Search engines show results in two sections:

• paid search results, and 
• organic search results.

Paid results are generally shown at the top of the search, but can be costly if the price-per-click budget isn't carefully managed. Organic results are based on an indexing of your Web pages for text patterns, key words, and phrases that can be used to rank the page in search results for those keywords. You can optimize your pages to appear higher in organic search results by paying attention to how you create your page and content.

In this guide I'm going to talk specifically about organic search results, because any idiot with a credit card can get ranked #1 on Google's paid search. But that's an expensive way to do business.

Organic search, and much of this guide, comes down to one word: content.

They say "Content is King," but it's not true. Search and Social (the ability to have your Web site found and shared) are the twin rulers of the Internet -- but content is the power behind the throne.

Copywriting for SEO
When you write for the Web you’re trying to serve two masters, and it can be tricky sometimes. First and foremost, you’re writing for humans, so your work must be readable. I’m sure you’ve received spam emails that someone had removed every pronoun and preposition and just sent you whatever was left. That’s bad SEO copy. If your text isn’t readable, no matter how much a computer loves it, no human will ever read it.

Second is that you must also write for computers . When you know what kinds of keywords your site visitors are looking for, you can incorporate those, and other related phrases, into your writing.

So how do you strike the right balance?

Laura Lippay, partner at Nine by Blue (and former Technical Marketing Director for Yahoo!), says "If I had to weigh usability against SEO, I'd always choose usability. I think about whether what I'm writing is beneficial for my readers, because if it is, they'll share it and they'll link to it."

But that's not to say that you should ignore keywords in your copy -- search engines use these words to figure out what your page is about, and to categorize and index it. But to include keywords, you need to know which ones. And chances are, your copy already includes some of the most useful ones.

To illustrate how build keyword optimization into your content, let's say you own a business that repairs flat screen televisions. Take a few minutes to think of all the things your customers might put in their search engine when they try to find a tv repair company. Getting ranked on the first two or three pages of search results is important to give your Web site the best opportunity to be viewed by searchers. But getting ranked for keywords that are related to your business is more important. If you repair televisions, it's not helpful to you to be ranked on page one of Google's results for "screen door repair." You'll ideally want to be well-ranked for words like:

television repair
tv repair
lcd tv repair
lcd television repair
flat screen tv repair
fix my tv
fix my flat screen
fix my lcd
broken tv
tv not working
free estimate

...and so on.

Now, you can either use all of these phrases, or you can go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and start plugging in search terms.

The term "television repair" yields 551 results.

You can sort the results by monthly global searches, monthly local searches, or keyword competition. Keyword competition is a good reflection of how much you might need to pay per click in a paid search.

Since you probably don't take tv repair jobs from other countries you'll want to sort by local searches.

"LCD tv" was searched 1,220,000 times in the last month, while "samsung tv" was searched 673,000 times. Other manufacturers also appear in the list, so perhaps it would be a good idea to make sure you identify the manufacturers whose products you repair in your text. Either way, using the most-searched-for terms is the best place to start.

So maybe your site copy might read:

Do you have a flat screen tv that doesn't work anymore?
Don't think about throwing your broken tv away before you bring it to ABCTV Repair. We'll take a look at your lcd television and give you a free estimate of how much it will cost to fix your Toshiba, Sony, Philips, or Samsung flat screen.

Hopefully, to most readers, this short description reads very naturally, and would encourage them to have their tv checked out. To search engines, however, it's a wonderful list of keywords and phrases (highlighted) that will direct Internet users straight to your Web site.

Regularly adding new content to your site, and optimizing site copy aren't the only things that can help you climb the search engine rankings; what goes on in your site's code is important, too. Alt Text and Meta Tags for page elements like images are important to help search engines categorize and index those elements. Page titles and section headers should have meaningful titles that include keywords, too. But if you have the chops to create the code for these things, you probably already understand SEO for coding.

These are the parts of SEO that you have some control over, and from which  you'll see quick(er) results from your efforts. However, there are longer-term actions you can take that slowly improve your site's ranking in ways that are more effective over time (such as generating inbound links to your site.)

Methods for generating inbound links on other Web sites, but the method can be summed up in a sentence: comment on other sites where you can leave links to your own site. When search engines look at those sites, they'll see links to yours, and that's important in helping search engines figure out how trusted your work is.

And let's not forget the reason for all this work: getting people to your Web site so that they'll buy something or share something.

Next: Selection. Why do searchers choose your, or anyone else's, site to look at?

Three Truths For Marketers About Social Networks

Okay, marketers, here are three truths about social networks, because it's clear that some of you have no clue.

• People use them because they're a convenient way to engage with other individuals. If it was inconvenient, nobody would do it.
• You can't ask someone else to be your voice and still be credible.
• Real influencers can't be bought, and they'll laugh at you if you try.

I try not to be negative in my life. I'm not a huge proponent of all that hippy "putting positive energy out there" stuff, but if I have to put energy out there all the time I may as well try to make is work for me.

But sometimes it's hard to not just want to pull my hair out and yell at respected organizations, who should know better, putting meaningless crap in their white papers.

It turns out that when marketers author a white paper, they take good research carried out by the likes of Pew, Forrester, and Nielsen, and turn it into really good fertilizer. Here's a few examples of statements in real white papers which illustrate the points up at the top of this post.

 1. Lies, damn lies, and advertising.

"...people who are heavy users of sites like Facebook and Twitter actually use email more than casual social network users do."

Okay, I can believe that.

"Why is this? Social media sites like Facebook [send an email] whenever someone comments on something you post..."

Uh...wait, what? Let me get this straight -- people who use Facebook use email more because they receive more email...from Facebook? Please wait one second while my head explodes...

So the reason for the heavier volume of inbound email isn't from interacting more with email...it's from interacting more...with Facebook.

What I think the white paper author probably meant to say is that social network users typically live their lives in a generally-more-electronically-connected way. They're more likely to send an email than pick up the phone. Or that --  wait for it -- spending more time sat in front of your computer makes you more likely to use email no matter what Web sites you're looking at.

2. The Milli Vanilli Method

"75% [of marketers] plan on increasing their activities [on Facebook.]" While "73% of marketers will increase their activities on Twitter." 71 percent of LinkedIn marketers, and 75 percent of blog marketers also plan to increase their activities on those platforms.

Sadly, less obviously in the same report, it was noted that 10 percent of marketers surveyed said that they'd be outsourcing content creation.

So here's what bugs me about this...they still don't get it. Its marketers being full of crap. Again. And it makes me furious. Outsourcing social network content creation is the Milli Vanilli method. Why would you ever give someone from outside your company direct access to your most important and viral customer service point of contact? If you want your customers to get to know who you are, isn't being yourself a good place to start?

3. You scratch my back, I...er...I got nothin'.

"We do some data minig to identify [influencers]. These are people you'd want to target with special campaigns/offers and proactive communications."

Now, I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, but if you have 20,000 Twitter followers, and you get a special targeted message or (better yet) free stuff from an organization that has a product that you haven't expressed some kind of interest in, aren't you likely to ponder "Why am I receiving these messages from this company that just started following me?"

Most companies don't realize that the other side of this "free marketing" sword is twice as sharp, and uncontrollable by the marketer. For example, if they happen to come across as a jerk by getting offended that you're not reciprocating by alerting your followers, they can expect that you'll call them out. Publicly. To your 20,000 followers.

So marketers, I get that you have to find ways to monetize social space for your company, I really do. I mean, it's what I do, too. But at least be honest with your audience -- they're not stupid. Making false connections, continuing to support outsourcing social media content creation, and sleazing up to thought-leaders is only going to show you up for what you are: a salesman, hopelessly applying old  closing techniques to a new world order you don't understand.

So be more than that. For me. Do it for you. Get yourself waist-deep in Twitter and really connect with people. Don't talk about what you're selling; just listen to what matters to your new friends...then help them achieve it.

Six Secrets of Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing. Chances are you hate receiving it - and why? Because at any given moment you don't want what they're selling. And the rest of the time, the writing is so loaded with sales speak that you stop reading after the second sentence and drop the email in your spam folder.

But your own email marketing is important to you. You can use it to send people to your Web site, or to let them know about a new product launch (or a recall if you're very unlucky), or even just stay in touch with them.

A successful email marketing campaign hinges on the idea that, and I can't say this loud enough, you have to know what you want your customer to hear. You don't have to know what you want to say, not when you're in the planning stage of the campaign, but you have to know what you want your reader to take away.

Since most people don't read more than a few sentences, you need to get the most engaging stuff out at the top. You need to give your customer a...

Reason to Keep Reading
At the start of this blog, I posed a question. I gave you a reason to read some more, even if it was only to disagree with my answer. You've seen this attention capturing technique before -- just think of any commercial with a voice over: "Does your aching back keep you up at night?" "Are rodents ruining your lawn?" "Can a new set of tires give you better gas mileage?"
They work. They grab our attention, but to keep it, you need to be skilled at...

Telling a Good Story
Aesop and the Grimm brothers are great examples of how to tell a compelling story -- they have a beginning, a middle, an end, and usually some kind of lesson. Goldilocks, Hansel and Gretel, the Hare and the Tortoise, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs -- they all have lessons that are the point of the story. The story is just window-dressing for the message.

You can tell a story about two customers, one who used your company's product, and one who used a cheaper alternative. Over the life of a project, the guy who used the cheaper alternative had to replace and/or repair his inferior product a few times, which ratcheted up the cost of the project and caused it to over-run. His company's reputation took a costly hit, and his projected profit was slashed due to delays caused by the cheaper alternative.

The customer who put his money in your better quality product may have paid a higher price up-front, but his project came in ahead of schedule, and his customers intend to recommend him to other potential customers. As a bonus, the customer who bought your product for their project will tell people at his Chamber of Commerce about your product, and how it helped him realize a bigger profit than he had expected.

If you have testimonials that can provide actual numerical comparisons, or statistics to show how much money or time users can save that's even better. A big red splash saying "SAVE 30%" is good, but...meaningless. Is that 30 percent on what you charged last year? Is this a sale? Show your customers the many advantages you offer compared to your competitors.

You shouldn't lie in your stories, but if your customers sometimes experience extraordinary results, it's okay if your message includes...

Claims of Extraordinary Results
...so long as you say they they're not typical if they're not typical.

In the story above, I claim that use of your product caused:

• the project to come in ahead of schedule
• positive word of mouth from your customer to other potential customers
• larger project profit margins than were forecast

Are those typical results? Probably not, but you can bet that one or two of them are a consistent outcome for most of your customers. In most marketing campaigns, results and testimonials are not based on single-user experiences, but on the combined experience of multiple users, spliced together to tell a good story.

The point of all this is to interest and excite the reader so that they click, call, or email you. And if you don't tell them to do it, they probably won't. So you have to include a...

Call to Action
For your no-obligation 30-day free trial....
Call today to save 25%
Refer a friend and save 20% on your next order.
Join our mailing list to receive great deals in the future.

The entire purpose of marketing is to make people want to take that action. Usually you want that action to be a sales transaction, but in the age of digital marketing simply capturing name and contact information is valuable. Being able to deliver marketing materials electronically to your contact list reduces marketing costs substantially, so whatever else your call to action is, it MUST include a way to capture that information.

At any given time, most people will not be in the market for your product, and most won't even open the email. Those are not the people you're writing for. You have to...

Know who you're writing for
You're writing for the 3 percent who are thinking about making a buying decision now, or soon. You're writing for the 10 percent who are considering this kind of investment in the future.

If you write for the 70 percent who won't even open your email, you've failed. I know a guy in sales who lives by one simple rule: fish where the fish are. You probably wouldn't email movie stars to try to get endorsements for your product, but you might be able to get local radio hosts or tv news anchors to do it. you have limited resources - both time and money - so invest it wisely. When it comes to that 70 percent, don't write them off, but don't write to try to persuade them.

Email marketing campaigns will always fail, though, if you fail to track your results and tweak as you go. For that reason, don't think of sending the first email without having...

Tracking metrics
Listrak have a great white paper about tracking metrics for digital marketers. You should read it, but here are the highlights:

Delivery Rate: How many of your emails actually reach their intended recipient, and how many are delivered to a spam folder? How many are bounced by ISPs?

Unsubscribe and Abuse Report Rates: How many opt-in emails do you get tired of, and instead of unsubscribing you simply flag that sender as spam? If enough people do this to your email, it can cause problems like getting your domain black-listed by ISPs. If your subject line looks spammy, most subscribers will delete your email without looking at it. If you're communicating too often, and not adding value to your subscribers' business, you'll find your readership shrinking as your audience unsubscribes. And that's just bad for your marketing efforts.

Open Rate and Read Rate: Open rate is a misleading name -- if you use an email client like Outlook or Entourage and have a preview pane, any email that appears in that pane will be listed as "opened." Even if you glance at it and then delete it. Read rate is a more meaningful measure, since it tracks emails that were "open" for a more than a few seconds.

Click-thru Rate: It's what it says it is. Did your reader click on the call to action? If they do this, your message worked.

Goal Conversion Rate: Once your reader clicks the call to action and is directed to your Web site, how many actually buy something, download something, interact with your Website in a way that is meaningful for your company?

Being successful with your email marketing isn't about luck, it's about writing compelling copy that persuades people to take action. It's not magic, and it's not really all that complicated. By paying attention to what you say and who you're talking to, you can increase engagement with your audience and convert your email list into a powerful tool for increasing revenues and growing your brand.

Get Your GooglePlus Vanity URL

I've seen a lot of information out there about getting a Google+ vanity URL, and how Google needs to get on the stick with that piece of updating right quick.

Well, for all of you out there who own a domain, I have a solution. I own the domain www.swaymaker.com - it's a nice domain, and hosts a Wordpress copy of this blog. For now.

Here's what you do...you go to whatever dashboard your domain vendor provides you with. If you have a GoDaddy domain, or one of several other domain vendors, you'll have free subdomains. GoDaddy give you 90 of them.

So I set up http://plus.swaymaker.com and then go to my G+ profile page and copy the URL. It's https://plus.google.com/100074993095416326109/posts so I can see why people want vanity URLs. Then I point the forwarding for plus.swaymaker.com at the Google+ profile page and...that's it.

Wait for the change to go through your vendor's system and you can now happily point people to plus.yourdomain.com -- sure, it's going to go crazy when Google do allow vanity URLs, but this will work for now.

Five Lessons Every Business Can Learn From...Fight Club

I am Jack's self-aware sense of irony.

Yes, this is a blog post about how to make your business more successful, inspired by the movie, (and Chuck Palahniuk's book it was based on) about destroying corporations. The first rule of this post is you talk about this post. The second rule of this post is...you talk about this post.

If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, dig yourself out from under that rock, come out of the cave, and rent the DVD. If you're really fancy, rent the Blu-Ray.

If you're in your office right now, or on your schmanzy smartphone in an office supply store, go on over to the Avery mailing labels and check out the 1 1/2 inch labels (Avery Catalog #8293) or click this link - that's the street address for the Paper Street Soap Company. Now laugh as we find the business wisdom in the words of Tyler Durden and The Narrator (who we shall call Jack.)

Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy
Your product or service is probably not unique. And I'm not using "unique" in the hackneyed way it's being used in the 21st century. I don't mean that your product isn't interesting. I mean it's probably not the only one of its kind on the market. Whatever you're selling, chances are someone else is selling it, too. Or they tried in the past and failed.

Take all the Groupon copycats. Not an original idea, but there's a new one springing up every other week, even though the model is demonstrably unprofitable.

Before you invest your life savings and your future in your business you should investigate your product thoroughly. Try to argue all the reasons that your business is a bad idea. Really. Make it stand outside your house for three days with no food or water, with you insulting it every few hours. If it's still there after three days, it's probably either impervious to logic, or a great idea.

So, you have a great idea. Now you have to market it. It's important that you realize that there's probably no new ways to market your product. Sure, you read "Guerilla Marketing," and you know how to invest your marketing dollars. You may even have read Olivier Blanchard's excellent "Social Media ROI" and you have an idea of how to measure your digital marketing campaigns. But your campaign is something we've seen before. Your hook is something we've seen before, and maybe we've even rejected it.

So how do you get your foot in the door? You accept that you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Accept that all business ideas are based on an need not met by someone else's idea. All marketing is based on bringing awareness to that need and how your product can fulfill it.

And now I suppose you want an answer to this prickly quandary. I can't tell you how to be original, but what I can say is this: for all of us, there is comfort in the familiar. As consumers, we don't want the challenge of understanding and assimilating a new idea. Give it to us straight, and if your message is perceived as honest, and your product meets a need that we have, we'll probably buy. It's really that simple.

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
In his book, "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure," Economist Andrew Harford shares a stunning statistic: of the top 100 companies in the world in 1912, over half had gone out of business by 1995. Harford says, "What happens when we look at survival rates in young, dynamic industries? The answer is that failure rates are even higher."

The truth is that what we consume and how it's delivered changes, sometimes rapidly. In 1970, this was the most advanced portable music player.

It's a record player in a suitcase. You can use it as an airline carry-on. But only just.

Ten years later, the portable music player of choice was this.

It plays tapes. Ask a grown-up what "cassette tapes" are.

And now it's this.

It's smaller than a credit card, and holds your parents' entire collection of records and cassettes.

Try buying either of the first two today.

And while 40 years might seem like a long time, consider that once we figured out how to fly, it took a scant 66 years to put a man on the moon. In 2077 I'll be dead. Probably. But I know a breakthrough that happened today will be not only commonplace, but probably obsolete, by then.

There's a reason that the US Marine Corps has the mantra "Adapt, Improvise, Overcome." It works.

All businesses eventually fall prey to technical or cultural obsolescence, or a competitor that can run leaner. The companies that survive recessions and depressions know how to evolve their business model, they don't buy into a long-term vendor contract when the market for that vendor's product is peaking, and they understand the value of their human capital.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything
When you're a kid, playing on the monkey bars, it's only scary to fall the first time. Before we fall off we're cautious, maybe even fearful. But when you hit the playground floor that first time, when you dust yourself off and realize that it wasn't so bad, you figure out where you screwed up and why you fell...and you devise better, more successful ways to negotiate the monkey bars.

If you talk to serial entrepreneurs who've secured angel or VC funding on more than one occasion, you'll find a common story. They failed in their first business ventures. They lost a ton of money for their investors, but their investors didn't hesitate to give them more money the next time they came knocking.

Why, when an entrepreneur's business fails, do investors want to risk more money? It's simple really: investors do not invest in businesses. They invest in people.

If you have one good idea, it's a fair bet that you'll have another. Entrepreneurship takes a certain personality, like being a professional poker player. Entrepreneurs and pro poker players share a trait: they never stop learning. Every experience makes them better at what they do, more successful, far less likely to fail in the future.

Entrepreneurs who can't take theit failures and turn them into something that makes them better are going to fail. Again and again. Investors look for people who can negotiate the monkey bars better next time.

No fear, no distractions -- let that which does not matter truly slide
There's a single-mindedness you need to develop as an entrepreneur. The Paper Street Soap Company works like a bee hive, and your business needs to adopt some of that mentality. Some of it, not all of it. If you adopt it all, your employees will never innovate, they'll just wait around for your next instruction.

Goal-setting is one of the most important things you can do as a leader. If your team can see the end-game, the finished product, they can help find innovative ways to execute your plans. Daily re-focusing on the goal will reduce distractions. If your employees know how their work contributes to the final product, they'll be more diligent, more innovative, and more engaged.

What your employees do need, and this will come from your leadership, is a belief that the work they are doing has value.

If you allow yourself to be distracted by trivia, rather than the tasks that help you achieve your goals, your employees won't know where to focus their energies, and that will drive up costs, reduce productivity, and can lead to your final product being a costly experiment in how not to address a need.

This does not belong to us, we are not special
When fight clubs and Project Mayhem start appearing in many cities -- Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Jack demands to know what's going on -- and Tyler tells him "This does not belong to us."

When anything "goes viral," the creator has ownership of the original idea co-opted by others who will replicate it, expand on it, mutate it, and evolve it into something new or different.

Here's a technical definition: what you want, ideally, is to spawn an Internet meme. For example, "The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club. The second rule..." That's a meme. It's out there, in our consciousness, unaltered from its original form.

When something "goes viral" it gets altered, people make their own versions, and those versions sink into our consciousness. You want an example?

In the summer of 2010, a video of a guy on a hike surfaced. He saw a "double rainbow" and raved about how wonderful it was. It was a huge youtube hit. It went viral, and was promptly co-opted by people who edited it, autotuned it, and performed it as a dramatic reading. They all went viral.

Do you remember the name of the "Double Rainbow" guy? Or the name of the guy that was interviewed for the news about a "Bedroom Intruder?" No. You know the viral video but not the source material. While it's great to get your message out in front of millions of youtube visitors, if it's being watered down, changed, mocked, or parodied, nobody will remember that it's your message.

You want to be remembered? Focus less on "how can I go viral" and more on "how can I make this memorable?"

Goal Setting - Smart Business Goals

I've talked a little bit about how important goals are as a starting point to achieving anything in business, because goals drive activity, and activity without goals is just busy-work and a waste of money. Knowing what you want to achieve allows you to create strategy, and strategy is where you determine how to achieve those goals.

But how do you set goals in the first place?

There's an easy acronym for you: SMART. Your goals have to be SMART. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time Sensitive. SMART.

Specific
Your goals have to achieve something, and that achievement must be very specific. You want to improve call center response times, or transactions per day, or unique visitors per day to your Web site.

Measurable
That's a good start, but there must be a finish line -- improve call center response times by 20 percent, increase transactions per day from 1,200 to 1,450, increase unique Web site visitors from 8,500 to 11,000. Setting interim mileposts is important, too. It will make sure you're on track to reach the goals you've set, and give you opportunities to correct tactics that aren't effective.

Achievable
If your goal is to improve Web site unique visitors per day from 8,500 to 85,000 in the next quarter, you're probably aiming too high. If you want to increase to 9,100, you're probably aiming too low. Ideally your goals should be stretching, but achievable. Most of us operate at about 85 percent of what we could achieve in a day. And that's nothing to be sneezed at. But if your business runs at the same efficiency, you can set your sights on that 8,500 visitors being stretched to 10,000. If you reach 10,000 that's great -- your next goal can be more stretching.

Realistic
Every goal has three key elements: scope, resources, and quality of finished product. If circumstances mean that you need to reduce the number of employees assigned to the task, while maintaining the quality of the finished work in the same amount of time...you're probably going to have to reduce the scope of the work. If you demand better quality product with the same scope, you'll likely need to also add resources (which may be allowing additional time.) It's not a hard concept when you get used to it.

I say all this to illustrate that there are limits to what you can achieve with finite resources. And you do have finite resources. So your goals have to be stretching, but must be realistically achievable with the resources available to you.

Time Sensitive
Goals are pointless if you don't have a finish line. You want to add 1,000 subscribers to your blog? Well, just keep going forever, you'll get there eventually. You want to reduce your energy costs by 10 percent? Simple, just wait for your provider to reduce their charges by 10 percent. And you can wait and wait.

If you don't put a time limit on your goals, you're not going to be pressed into action. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and it's true. Many procrastinators confess to doing their best work right at deadline. The truth is that deadlines lead to innovation.

Changing processes to be more efficient, finding new ways to increase customer satisfaction, or turn more eyeballs to your Web site all require out-of-the-box thinking. And out of the box thinking, for most of us, requires the desperation induced by a rapidly-approaching deadline.

Why Social Media Marketing Starts With Strategy

Let's say that you want to figure out what people are saying about your company. Why? Why are your customers’ opinions important enough to spend your company's time and money on listening to them, not to mention take resources away from other tasks that might be revenue-generating?

You might say something like:

• You've heard it's good to listen to what your customers are saying online
• You think your competitors could be doing it
• You don't want to get left behind

Those are the reasons you'll probably be tempted to use, but none of them can be related to your business activities, and therefore they can’t be related to anything that helps your company stay in business.

To properly formulate the case for social listening, you have to tie it to a business goal. If you are assigning a resource to this activity (and you will be) it will incur an expense. You should be able to show where that expense will be offset, either by:

• generating revenue
• reducing costs
• positively supporting your brand identity

So change the question.

How can social listening activities support these goals?

To break that down further, you need to look at your company’s overall strategy for each of those items, and determine if social listening is a tool that will help you to be successful.  Will it help you be more successful than the next-best alternative?

It could be that your social listening will, in the end, support more than one -- it might reduce the cost of your customer care function while building positive word-of-mouth about your brand.

Would you buy an expensive power-tool and then try to find projects around your home that you’d need to use it for? Or would you figure out that you have a project to complete and then decide if an expensive power-tool is the right tool for the job?

You can’t know if social listening will support your goals if you don’t have goals. The goals come first. Then strategy, then tactics and tools.

Goal: Reduce calls to the call center by 25 percent in the next 12 months.

Strategy: Provide alternative ways for customers to address their issues before they feel the need to call the call center.

Tactics: How-to guides on the Web site; Tip of the Day emails; How-to videos on the Web site; mail information to registered customers; post links to how-to guides on social media Web sites; monitor calls the call center and activity on social networks to determine which issues are the most frustrating for customers.

Some tactics will likely be more successful than others, and you can probably determine whether a specific tactic will be the right one for your company before you spend a lot of money on it. Tip of the Day emails, for example, have a very low open-rate; which is to say that less than about 20 percent of recipients will open the first one, and that number will dwindle with each new email. Unless you’re offering deals, like Groupon, diminishing returns on bulk emails is a fact of life. Mailing information using the Postal Service has an even lower success rate.

How-to videos can be costly, and may involve a re-design of your Web site or content management system, which is also true of text-based tutorials. However, as part of a longer-term strategy, the cost of these activities might represent good value in the long run.

For more immediate results, you might start by assigning someone to monitor Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, and to provide answers to the questions posed on the company’s Facebook Wall or for any questions directed at your Twitter name or hashtagged with your company name. The significant drawback of this solution is that it means your employee might have to give the same information to dozens, or even hundreds, of customers with the same problem.
So maybe the most effective tactics to achieve the goal would be some hybrid of:

• standard information that can be referenced quickly and easily distributed, like a Frequently Asked Questions section on your Web site, and
•  someone monitoring call-types and social media conversations to determine which questions need to be answered by one-to-one interaction, and which can be directed to the FAQs page you’ve created.

You can probably see that, in this example, the social media activity is one of a number of natural solutions to help the company achieve its goal. If you try to reverse-engineer a goal from social media activity you’ll probably be wildly successful. The trouble is, you won’t have achieved very much, you won’t have learned anything about how to create social media marketing to achieve a goal, and so your success will be unrepeatable.

If you want to run social media marketing campaigns, you must learn how to use the various platforms and applications as tools to achieve goals, and not to adapt goals to justify your activities in social space.

Five Things You Need to Know About Social Listening

Social listening is the activity you're engaging in when you pay attention to what consumers are saying about your company at any given time, and even what's being said about your competitors, or your industry in general.

Listening is a relationship function, and social listening for a business isn't terribly different from listening to your spouse or significant other. There are behaviors that will make you more successful, and some that will continuously throw roadblocks in your way and frustrate you.

1. Be open to whatever is being said, however critical. If someone is raising a concern with you, don't dismiss it, even if it seems petty or unreasonable.

2. Learn to look at the situation from the customer's perspective. Remember that they're probably not aware of most of the solutions available to them, even if those solutions are on your web site. The customer doesn't work for your company, and there are some things it's not reasonable to expect your average customer to know.

3. They didn't tell you they have a problem because they had some free time, so make sure you reassure them that their concerns are valid, even if the solution is simple.

4. Take a minute to research the customer's issue before you respond, so you can provide the most educated response to their specific circumstances. If their comment was angry or upset, take care that you don't respond to emotion with emotion. That's like using a match to respond to a gas leak.

5. Don't set up unrealistic expectations. Telling the customer what they want to hear will, only very rarely, resolve the issue, especially if you can't provide that level of service consistently in the future for that customer.

How to Do #FollowFriday and Be a Real Twitter Influencer

Click here for my #FollowFriday list.

This post is about not doing #FF the same as everyone else. It's about singling out the individuals whose tweets you seek out. It's about finding new ways to bring value to the people you follow. You can call it paying it forward, or whatever you want -- but it's really about authentic engagement with your social media audience.

If you're on twitter, it's likely that you see #FF or #followfriday lists pop up as the weekend gets closer. Most likely they'll look like this:

RandomUser #FF @myfriend @thisguyIknow @workplacebuddy @storeIlike @websiteIvisitedonce @dudewhoRTedMe Love your tweets!

Which is nice. I mean, it gets a little exposure for the people you mention, and that's great. But let me ask you this question. When you see #FF lists in your stream, how many of the names in the list do you click on?

Yeah, I thought so, me too.

Have a Goal - Help a Brother (or Sister) Out
What's your #FollowFriday goal? Is it to let your followers know who you know? Is it self-serving name-dropping (which never works, by the way)? Or is it to create new followers for the people you follow?

To persuade your followers to follow someone you are following, they need more than just a name and your tweet.

Most people are using Twitter as a social exposure tool. Most people also tend to follow users they'll read, enjoy, and retweet -- that kind of twitterati is much more appealing than someone who only consumes. Twitter is a conversation, and you have to let the other participants know that you value their input. So recommend people who will add value to your followers, either by retweeting or by posting retweetable messages. If they'll add value, your followers will follow them.

Doing #FollowFriday the right way takes a little time. But taking the time shows your followers that you think these users are worth the effort -- that they'll add value to the tweet streams of anyone who follows them. These tips will show you how to use #FF to show that real value to the people you follow.

1. Start #FF by telling Twitter "I will follow every user mentioned in any #FF list I'm in." Being mentioned in a #FF list should be an honor, and the people mentioned with you are people whose posts you'll probably enjoy. Do it, and watch how many #FF lists you get included in. Then follow them. All of them.
   
2. Send an @mention to let the user who sent out the #FF list know that you followed all their recommendations and you're looking forward to great tweets and great future #FF lists. They'll thank you for it. And retweet the original list with a "Thanks for including me!" message.
   
3. Get creative with how you make your #FF lists. Do them with a city theme, or maybe only people with blogs you read, or perhaps companies you do business, or people who inspire you, or experts in a particular field...it's practically endless. If you do a themed list, hashtag it with the theme when you post it.
   
4. Most people using Twitter are using it to get eyes on their blog or company Web site. Your #FF recommendations every week are great word of mouth. On top of that, SEO for sites is improved by the number of inbound links there are on external sites. Sure, it's not a lot of SEO juice, but it's some. Everyone appreciates link-backs from other sites, and sometimes you'll get a link back to your site as a thank you. Creating a page on your blog that includes all these links can be a great way to add a little SEO value to the sites of the people you follow.

Why I Do It My Way
If you've clicked any of the links in #3, you've seen how I do my #FF -- I create a page that I can post as a Twitter update and @mention the people on my list. This has the benefit for me that I'm getting clicks on my site as my #FF people check out what link they've been associated with, but also they re-tweet my link to their followers, and mostly they click around some of my other posts, which increases the possibility that they'll tweet one of my posts.

There's a traffic advantage to me for doing it this way, for sure, but there's also the benefit to all the people in my #FF list - past and present. They get many more visitors looking at their Twitter bio, and a recent tweet to put them in context, in a way that might make visitors interested to follow them on Twitter.

Valuable reciprocity is the name of the game for #FF, so what are you really doing for the people on your #FF list?

Using Twitter Lists to Get Traffic for Your Web Site

If you're hoping to monetize your blog, and nobody knows you're posting great content there, you may as well not bother writing at all.

I don't say that to be mean, but it is important to understand that, as the saying goes, a leader with no followers is just a guy out for a walk.

So you need followers. If you've read my pieces about Twitter, you might have the impression that I think that getting followers is somehow dirty. It's not, and I apologize if I made you think that. You need eyes on your work to get anyone to tweet about it or give you a Facebook "Like." So how do you get the most eyes pointed your way?

What I will discourage up-front, and consistently, is using a piece of software to automate your following and engagement behavior. But with that said, here's a simple five step process to increasing your followers...legitimately.


Let's assume you have at least *some* followers, or that you're following some thought leaders in your industry.

1. Find an active Twitterati. Make it someone whose tweets you look forward to reading.
   Chances are, they're listed by a bunch of people who also look forward to this person's tweets. People like you, in fact.
   
2. Pick a list,and when it comes up, click the "Following" tab. It should have the number of people who are being followed in this list.
   
3. Now you just have to look down the profiles and add the people who you find interesting. Yes, it takes time, but you're adding people who you're probably going to enjoy reading and engaging with.
   
4. Engage with the people you added. Give them some @mentions and retweet the great things they say. While they may have been unknown to you five minutes ago, you do have things in common with them, and you have a bunch of reasons to engage with them. Remember to tweet out original thoughts, and occasional links to your blog, but mostly you should engage with your new friends.
   
5. Repeat. Some of these folks are going to autofollow you. Don't worry about why they follow you, only why you're following them. Others won't follow you at all. Don't worry about that, either -- they're going to appear in your Tweetstream and give you a ton of stuff to talk about and engage with them. If you're genuine and engaging, they'll eventually follow you.

See, it's not difficult. If you follow a couple of big lists in a day, chances are you'll see your followers sky-rocket. And when that happens, you'll see more people @mentioning you, and retweeting your links and comments.

In time they'll begin coming to your blog and tweeting links directly from your social sharing buttons.

Remember -- this is different from using a follow-bot. You're deliberately choosing each person you follow, based on mutual friends, and shared subject-matter interest.

And now you want to follow me, because you never know when I'm going to post something useful.

How to Grow Your Followers in Twitter

1. Don't follow everyone. It's okay if the number of people you're following is LOWER than the number of tweets you've put out. While there are no hard and fast rules about how many people you follow, you probably don't want to follow more than about twice as many people as are following you. When you find Twitter users whose updates you really enjoy, mention them in your #FollowFriday lists. Remember, real people provide interesting opinion and perspective. Follow-bots provide followers who have no opinion or perspective, and nothing you can retweet.

2. Spread your tweets out through the day. If you have regular marketing messages, use something like Hootsuite to schedule them. Sending all your tweets in a five minute spell just gets you lost in the tweet streams of your followers. Or worse, your followers think you're spamming them. That's okay for marketing messages, but you need to remember that Twitter is a community, and it's imperative that you actually interact in a person-to-person way, too. Auto-tweeting doesn't include you in the conversation, or build relationships. And if you don't do those things, you're not going to get the best out of your Twitter experience.

3. Hashtag EVERY message. Using hashtags will get your tweets out in front of more than just your followers, and will generate more followers if your content is compelling. If you tweet good quality content out about a specific subject, and you do it with consistency and regularity, you'll fast become an expert around that subject's hashtag. And experts find themselves getting retweeted often.

4.  Don't follow users who don't tweet regularly. Don't follow people who only tweet self-serving marketing. The well-known rule of thumb is that for every self-serving tweet you put out, you should be putting out four informative tweets. Start by following a couple of magazines in your sector, and a couple of well known or interesting users. To begin with, only follow users who participate and who tweet regularly. Avoid users who have very few tweets, or are following a disproportionately high number of users compared to how many followers they have. If you follow Guy Kawasaki don't expect that he'll tweet your content. He won't (most likely.) Follow interesting people, retweet them. Thank them if/when they retweet your stuff.

5.  Retweet. This gets you on the rader of users you follow. Eventually, if you're putting out original tweets, and not just retweeting the thoughts of other users, they're likely to follow your tweets and retweet them. Making sure specific users get to see your tweets by giving them an @mention is a good way to let them know you exist. Just make sure what you're giving them is something that they might be interested in, and not just spam.

6.  Link shorteners. There are dozens of them. Use one. Your 140 characters are precious, don't waste them. Link shorteners also make it easy to track your clicks. For most of them, paste the link into the address bar and add + to the end to get click statistics. For example, http://goo.gl/xJRNL is the link, http://goo.gl/xJRNL+ is the statistics for the link. Really, it couldn't be easier.

7. Get listed in the right lists. It's just as important as getting specific followers. Use hashtags to become an expert in a subject -- users following that hashtag will add you to their list of experts, and are more likely to retweet and share your updates. There really isn't an easy way to get listed, other than by posting links to great content and being retweeted. It's about reputation.
FollowFriday is a great way to share the handles of users whose input you've found really valuable. Create a list for people you include in your own #FF lists, and you'll find yourself growing your list of followers in the best way possible: with people who contribute to the thousands of conversations going on in Twitter at any given moment.

8. Analytics. Know which of your tweets get the most clicks. See what content resonates with your followers. There are tools that claim to measure influence, like klout.com, EmpireAvenue, and PeerIndex. They're free, and provide metrics about how your network is interacting with you and the world, and vice versa. My favorite tool for tracking my Twitter, though, is TwitterCounter, which gives charts for followers, how many people you follow, and how many tweets you've posted.

9. It's okay to grow slowly. Don't stress out about getting hundreds or thousands of followers immediately. Certainly don't follow hundreds of people right away. Remember that it's an information exchange community -- if you're consuming more than you're putting in, you'll find it hard to get followers.

10. Know what to tweet. In a sample of 10 tweets, you probably want a breakdown that looks something like:
1 x Public reply @usertweet
2 x Marketing tweets
3 x Retweets
4 x Original thoughts/links to interesting content

And really, that's about all you need to know about Twitter to get started using it effectively. I know, it's a lot to take in, but if you don't have your expectations set too high you'll find that it's a useful tool for getting traffic to your site.

The Customer From Hell
I'm a hard-sell when it comes to customer service. I have pretty low expectations, and it bothers me when they're not met. So let me get those expectations out in the open so you can see that I'm not a crazy-man.

The short list is:

1. Work with me, and dont make excuses.
2. If your company's screw-up or mistake affects me adversely, you're going to have to own up to it and compensate me for my trouble.
3. Follow up, and fix problems, not symptoms.

The longer list is in the form of an advisory:

• "No" should not be in your vocabulary. If you tell me it can't be done, I'll tell you that if you escalate it high enough, there's someone who can make it happen now and you should be prepared to escalate to that level if you need to. 
• Customer service is for the 0.0001 percent of customers who experience problems.
• That 0.0001 percent of customers will tell 100 percent of their friends.
• Customer service is what you do when things go wrong. It is not covered by your procedures or call center scripts. 
• They're your processes and procedures, make them work or break them.
• If it's your core business activity, be competent. If something goes wrong, own up to it, and fix it.
• If you make a mistake and it affects me, you need to compensate me. 
• If you need to compensate me, it needs to be overwhelming.
• There is no such thing as a private customer service conversation. Companies record them for quality control, I post them on my blog and live-tweet them.
• I can out-wait you on the phone. If you can't fix my problem I'm not getting off the line. At some point the call-monitor is going to let a supervisor know you've been on a call for way too long. And then I'll speak to them.
• Your Director of Customer Service is on your Web site's About Us page. I'm pretty sure I can figure out his email address and let him know, by name, which of his customer service people are naughty, and which are nice.

Okay, maybe I am a crazy man.

I recently had this experience with GoDaddy (which I'm going to talk about at length), who clearly did not know that I have these guidelines which I, perhaps irrationally, expect them to operate under. GoDaddy also announced today that they've been sold for $2.25 billion. I hope that some investment in their customer service staffing is on the agenda, because they need to improve it. Urgently, and significantly. Just read on if you don't believe me.

The Problem


Tuesday. 2:50pm
I decide I'm moving my blog to WordPress. So I set up the WordPress account and then go to GoDaddy to set up hosting.
All I need to do is:

1. Set up a new hosting account.
2. Remove thatduncan.com from my current hosting account, set a new domain name as the primary domain for the current hosting account.
3. Add thatduncan.com as the primary domain name on the WordPress hosting account.

Easy, right?

For the rest of Tuesday I'm stuck at step 2, which shows as "Pending" on my account, but the process could take as long as 24 hours, according to the pop-up message when I switched the domain name on the hosting account. So I'm not too concerned.

Wednesday 3:54pm
Twenty-five hours have passed and I still can't use my preferred domain name on my WordPress hosting account. Which means I can't upload the WordPress software to my domain, which means I can't get into working with it.

So I call. I'm not going to use any names here, but I'm told that there was a problem, and that the event is going to be replayed, and while it could take as many as 72 hours, these things are usually done inside 24 hours. Great, another day wasted, but at least I know when I'll be up and running, right?

Phone time: 10:01 - Total Phone Time: 10:01

Thursday 9:22am
I get this email from GoDaddy:
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The issue with changing the domain name on your hosting account has been addressed and is resolved. The primary domain name on your hosting account has been updated and you are now able to access without issue. If you continue to experience delivery or access problems after today please let us know. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter.

Please contact us if you have any further issues.

So if the problem has been "addressed and is resolved" you'd think I should be able to use thatduncan.com on my WordPress hosting, because it's no longer associated with the other hosting account, right?

Nope.

So I make the call, and I'm told that the event failed again, and that it will be replayed, but it would be another day before the change would show on my account.

I ask why, if the event had failed, did I receive an email saying it was "addressed and resolved?" That was an error. Really? You think I can't deduce that, GoDaddy? I know it's an error, but what it tells me is that someone opened a ticket, someone closed a ticket, someone didn't check if the ticket had actually been resolved. Incompetence or laziness is my guess.

Phone Time: 36:50 - Total Phone Time: 46:51

Friday 10:55am
Another 24 hours has passed and I'm still stuck at pending. The first person I talk to tries to explain what happened and why they need to replay the even and why that will take another 24 hours.

It bothers me that I had to raise my voice and tell him to stop talking. It bothers me that he was more interested in explaining what went wrong (though not how or why) and telling me that there's nothing that can be done other than replaying the event. "It's so rare that this happens" he assures me. Well, it's happened to me three days in a row, so it doesn't feel particularly rare to me.

My feeling is that if it's failed three times in a row, maybe someone needs to start the event, make sure it succeeds, and keep trying until it works. I'm informed, in a tone that's more than a little annoyed, that the process doesn't work that way.

I ask to speak to someone who can make sure that it doesn't fail this time. I'm informed there isn't anyone. I am pretty sure that's a lie. I ask to speak to a supervisor, and I'm told that "you can speak to a supervisor, but they do the exact same things, and they'll tell you exactly what I just did." Which begs the question: what do GoDaddy supervisors get paid for if they don't have any additional authority? It took several minutes and several requests to get a supervisor. That's just bad customer service. In the end the impatient techie says he'll put me onto a supervisor "who won't be able to help me any more than he already has."

But he was wrong.

The supervisor agreed that the process failing was unusual, but that he would talk to the admins and have them replay the event, he'd call me back as soon as he had an answer.

Phone Time: 38:00 - Total Phone Time: 84:51

Friday 12:14pm
The supervisor talked to the admins and came back with their answer: they'll replay the event at 2:48pm, and that would fix it. 2:48pm Pacific, so 5:48pm Eastern. In about 6 hours. But that was the best he could do.

Phone Time: 7:06 - Total Phone Time: 91:57

And that's when I started tweeting.

How to Make Frenemies and Influence Customer Service Outcomes

 

So the issue was fixed faster when I started tweeting. And while I'm happy that GoDaddy have someone monitoring this stuff, I shouldn't have to start attacking their brand in order to get adequate customer service. It should be a reasonably simple process to empower front-line reps to fix problems. Using social media to protect your brand rather than engage and deliver great service isn't going to work long-term. Engagement needs to happen on the phone and on the Web site, not just in social space. Customers will see that the interest here isn't in improving customer experience, it's in managing complaints and getting the squeaky wheel to shut up before it does more damage.

Valuing Your Customer, the GoDaddy Way (ie. Not much.)

For the record, it's July 4th, and I'm still waiting for a response from GoDaddy that makes me feel like they really value me as a customer. $5 makes me feel like they don't value me at all. Hopefully by sharing this post on Twitter and letting them know just how badly I feel they screwed up, how unengaged they were, how it took an hour-and-a-half on the phone to get almost nowhere, and how I haven't felt, at any stage, like GoDaddy care about whether I am a customer of theirs or someone else's, I can influence them to reconsider their valuation of future business I might transact with them. Or not.
What I do know is that GoDaddy were engaged on Twitter until they said "here's $5" and they haven't responded to me for three days. That's not what being an engaged social space company is about. It's not about paying me off, it's about making me feel valued.

Feel free to message me or comment to let me know that my demands are both extreme and irrational. What do you think GoDaddy do to make this experience right? Would you be angry with this service, or do you think that it's acceptable?

Let me know...