Unhappy customers have a virtual megaphone to shout their discontent: The Social Media Platform.

While it’s tempting to take the easy route and simply delete or block a disgruntled comment, following the high road is a bit like handling an irate customer standing in your office. Except, of course, you can – and should – hit the delete button for offensive, profane, or defamatory posts.

Here are some basic guidelines for dealing with the unhappy customer on social media.

Follow the Boy Scout Motto and Be Prepared

Save yourself the agonizing, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and plan ahead. Create a list of the most common complaints based on your particular industry. Sit down with your customer service people to get feedback. Once you have done this, address each concern with a carefully written response.

Offer a plan in your response to resolve the problem where possible. Don’t offer free services, products, or discounts in a public response. This could encourage complaints from other customers who are looking to capitalize on a similar reward.

Adopt a Customer Mindset

A simple apology, even if the problem isn’t fixable, can change a customer’s negative attitude into a positive one. When writing responses to negative comments, show that you care with The 5 Be’s:

1. Be truthful – establish trust with honesty.
2. Be polite – always be professional and never rude.
3. Be sincere – show a willingness to be open and authentic.
4. Be humble – admit any mistakes.
5. Be appreciative – never belittle.

Ask yourself, would you be satisfied with this response? Apology psychology is a powerful way to change customer’s attitudes.

Give a Timely Response

Complaints left lingering unanswered for days have immediate negative fallback. This gives the customer the impression you don’t care, as well as the perception that their negative comment is valid, even if it isn’t. Other customers who see such comments might become discouraged, writing you off before ever doing business with you.

Show that you are listening and wait no more than twenty-four hours to respond, if at all possible. When you use negative feedback to make improvements, inform your customer of the changes they helped initiate.

Don’t monitor your social media for only the negative activity. Use positive comments as an opportunity to show your appreciation for their business.

Respond Publicly Once, Then Go Private

While it’s beneficial to respond publicly to negative feedback on Facebook or Twitter, the next step is to handle the issue privately. You’ve demonstrated your desire to address the problem so other customers will know you take their complaints seriously. Now you need to avoid a barrage of tug-of-war posts.

Include in your response an invite to contact you directly with a phone number or email of someone on the response team. This direct approach helps eliminate the “passing the buck” customer service irritant, something you don’t want customers posting in addition to their initial complaints.

Any further negative posts made after you have followed these steps justify deleting the comments or even blocking someone as a user.

Your message is clear.

You will address your customer’s complaints professionally and attentively on the social media channels. Your customers can then use the megaphone of social media to share their happy ending with friends and followers.

Check out AMEX’s infographic on social media and how people use it to make their complaints known.

Let us know your social media stories in the comments below. How did you respond to the virtual megaphone?

Cat photo courtesy of Mikko Luntiala.

 

 

In less than a year, Pinterest increased its total unique visitors by a whopping 2,702 percent. Clearly, there’s a marketing opportunity on Pinterest. Here’s a basic guide to get you started.

As a virtual pinboard, Pinterest gives its users inspiration and an avenue of discovery through pinning images from the web onto boards and by browsing other people’s boards for their ideas.

How are companies using Pinterest?

Behind-the-scenes scoops and sneak peaks. For example, share the inspiration for that new product design or campaign, or give a preview of your upcoming special offers. Remember, photos and images have the ability to capture interest far more than just text.

Valuable information resource. Infographics are a great graphic tool to distribute the data and statistics to your readers and followers. Since most of the users are women, as this infographic details, boards for fashion, recipes, interior decorating, and DIY projects abound.

Useful guide for services, events, or a distinctive feature. Hand over the responsibility of manning a board to contributors who can showcase a specialty of theirs. Have fun with re-pinning ideas that are relative to your specific board. Colleges everywhere are having fun pinning their school pride.

3 Benefits of Pinterest for Your Business:

1. Increased traffic – more visibility means more visits to your website.
2. Links to your website – when someone pins your image, the backlinks connect to the source.
3. Social sharing – users can easily re-share your pins on Facebook and Twitter, giving you more social  reach.

7 Pinterest Board Ideas

1. What’s your cause? If you support a charity or special cause, give it a board to spotlight its special events and people.
2. Designate a board for your products. Make multiple boards for different categories, or one for every product.
3. Highlight a season, holiday, or special theme. Uconn Huskies, the official Pinterest page for Uconn athletics, created a Little Huskies page, featuring its youngest fans.
4. Find a passion. Let the team come up with a shared interest. Uconn Co-op Bookstore’s eclectic boards include literary cats.
5. Promote a lifestyle. Choose other products that align with your brand and feature them on a specific board.
6. Get information. You can also learn new things, as well as share the information with your readers.
7. Involve your readers. Bergdorf Goodman asked their Facebook fans to complete this sentence, “In the morning I never forget…,” and pinned the responses to their aptly named “I never forget…” board.

Promote Your Pinterest Page By Adding Buttons

The Pin it Button. Adding this button to your website’s blog posts or web pages allows your readers to easily pin your images onto their Pinterest boards. This tells your readers you are absolutely okay with them pinning your posts and photos onto Pinterest, dispelling any concerns with the wave of copyright concerns.

The Pin it Bookmark. This handy computer tool lets you quickly pin items you come across as you are surfing the internet.

 

The Follow Button. With this button on your website, your readers will be able to easily follow your company on Pinterest.

Click on the “About” tab on the top of the page to find the “Goodies” feature for the simple directions on how to add and download these buttons.

If you are a WordPress user, follow the instructions on how to add a Pin it plugin for every single blog post. If you want to get fancy, check out Spice Up Your Blog for unique Pin it buttons, complete with the pin counts (number of times an image has been repinned). You will need to copy and paste the code by following these directions.

7 Important Pinterest Profile Tips

1. Use your company logo or image for the profile picture.
2. Include a caring message in your welcome line.
3. Clearly state what your company does.
4. Describe what your pinboards will contain (and invent clever board titles).
5. Your call to action is simple: ask visitors to follow your pinboards and profile.
6. Link to your website and your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
7. Edit your profile so the “hide” feature is set to off. This allows search engines to find you.

Hot Tip:

Sign up to Pinterest through your Twitter business account. Currently, only personal Facebook accounts and not Facebook pages can be linked to Pinterest.

Good luck with your Pin-spiration! Share your creative board ideas with us in the comments below.

To browse the world wide web, you need an internet browser. Once you find and open the website you searched for, your browser then translates the HTML code, enabling you to read text, view images, listen to audio clips, and play videos. That hyperlink you click on while reading? The browser takes you there.

You would be lost without it.

If you haven’t tried other browsers, you are limiting your web experience. Begin with trying one of the top five mega-browsers, listed here in order of their current reviews:

 

 

1. Google Chrome – Released in 2008 and now touted as the most popular browser worldwide.

 

 

 

2. Mozilla Firefox – Internet Explorer’s main competitor since the mid-2000’s.

 

 

 

 

 

3. Internet Explorer – Once the most popular browser, now being edged out as awareness grows.

 

 

 

4. Opera -Not so well-known, but has been around since the 1990’s and is feature-rich.

 

 

 

 

5. Safari – Apple’s baby since 2003, with features similar to Google’s Chrome.

 

 

 

Ever heard of Opera? Isn’t that where you dress up and watch through binoculars a drama unfold through song? What a quaint notion. Now you can do all that and so much more without ever leaving your desk.

The four main criteria

When comparing browsers, consider four main things: security, speed, ease of use, and features offered.

1. Security

The web continues to be filled with security risks. Most of these are small-scale attacks on electronic data. In order to help keep passwords and other personal information secure, browsers offer features such as privacy settings, clear data (i.e. history, cookies, and saved passwords can be cleared), anti-spyware protection, anti-phishing, anti-virus, and pop-up blockers.

Of these six features, only two are found missing in the top 5 browsers. Safari doesn’t have anti-phishing, which means it won’t display a warning when you are trying to access an fraudulent site posing as legitimate one.  Opera doesn’t have private mode, so you can’t work in a special stealth mode, keeping your browsing history, passwords, and cookies from being saved. (You could use the clear data feature instead as a clean-up solution.)

Internet Explorer has suffered in ratings from security vulnerabilities, but continues to be the most widely used browser. Do you agree this is generally a result of a lack of browser awareness? My kids all moved on from Microsoft’s default browser, long before Twitter showed problems with IE.

Overall, Chrome and Firefox rated as the top two in security.

2. Speed

When you navigate between pages, think of how long it takes for your internet browser to load.

Again, Google and Firefox claim the top seats for speed. If your browser seems slow or sometimes crashes or freezes, it’s time to try another browser. At the very least, make sure you have the latest version available. Only Internet Explorer won’t automatically notify you of this.

While a top internet browser will load and navigate pages in a matter of seconds, the issue for many users isn’t browser speed. The speed of their computer outweighs any discrepancy in browser speeds, leaving other concerns far more relevant, such as ease of use and the available add-ons.

3. Ease of Use

Here is where a browser’s simplicity comes into play. Its features are easily utilized through layout design and interface. In other words, all those desirable features and add-ons don’t add up to much if you can’t figure out how to make them work.

Chrome and Safari came in first for ease of use, although Firefox could be the unofficial win by a devoted user audience.

4. Features offered

Special features help make web surfing easy, fast, and customized. Safari holds the lowest rating in the features offered category, with Chrome and Opera winning the top spots. Firefox and Internet Explorer are the only two with parental controls, whereas Opera is the only browser with voice command and mouse gesture.

Chrome has hundreds of add-ons, including Angry Birds and Instagram, that will expand your browsing experience. Firefox has Adblock Plus and StumbleUpon among its popular items. Opera offers To-Read (a handy save-for-later list) and Meme Smileys for your browsing entertainment.

All your bookmarks are already in Internet Explorer? Not a problem. Browsing Better makes the transition of your favorites to another browser a snap.

You won’t know until you try. Whatever you do on the web – email, research, shopping, banking – do it with a browser best suited to you.

 

 

From the amped-up presidential debates themselves to the mega-wattage social media response, there are some marketing lessons to be gained from the matchups.

1. Stop interrupting.

I guess I just need to be thumper."if I can't say something nice… I won't say anything at all!" #thankyouryanfornotinterupting

— Mary Beth Chapman (@MaryBethChapman) October 12, 2012

When your clients are speaking, remember to listen. Fortunately, your conversations probably don’t take place in an environment of heightened competition. But it’s easy to see how  your audience can grow weary of a one-way tète-à-tète, even one where the other party doesn’t appear about to burst an aneurysm when they attempt silence.

Think of how much you can learn from actually listening to your customers, readers, and even your competition.

2. Keep your professionalism.

Here’s one where the temptation to respond in the social media and marketing sphere competes with the necessity to maintain a professional authority. Take Pizza Hut’s ploy, where an official live telecast attendee of the presidential debate was offered pizza for life if they dared to ask the age-old question, “sausage or pepperoni?”

What Pizza Hut allegedly meant to do is make sure “the real issues being debated in households across the country every night aren’t sidestepped by the candidates any longer.” What they actually did is help define the line for marketers.

Don’t cross over into murky territory unless you are willing to risk the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity. Are you shrewd enough to leverage it in a way that will be to your advantage? Ask Derek Halpern at socialtriggers.com; he’ll tell you that when it comes to pulling triggers, make them “hot.”

3. Find the balance.

Honestly it's like a game of musical chairs, except there are just enough chairs. YET THEY KEEP RUNNING AROUND.

— J.P. Freire (@JPFreire) October 17, 2012

In the 10:1 rule of Twitter, for every one time you tweet business, there should be ten mentions you make of other people. This ratio helps marketing efforts strike a balance between promoting yourself and making new connections.

The overall goal: Creating new relationships. Rather than running around in circles trying to outsell yourself and one-up the competition, take a seat and get to know your fans and followers. Show a genuine interest in them by sharing an outbound link or simply having casual conversation.

4. Save yourself by being you.

https://twitter.com/copyblogger/status/258398173779877889

Don’t lose yourself by speaking only to what you believe your readers want to hear. Wouldn’t it be a brighter world if all the promises made were followed through? Be that company.

Don’t just employ a meme, incorporate a hashtag, or use buzzwords just to participate in a social trend. The best way to be authentic is to stay with the voice that speaks for your brand.

Even if that voice resonates from a scheduled Twitter feed or Facebook post tool, there is still a person who crafts these social media updates. Make them as real as your readers.

Above all, have some fun. Perhaps the most fun for anyone was the social media feedback on the debates.

If you haven’t already signed on, do so. You can even skip the presidential debates altogether and get your game on with the the various social media strata.

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: kjarrett.