The part of Amy’s presentation that jumped out at me immediately is her bullet point #1 that encourages a strategic approach to social media rather than a casual one. Unfortunately, social media is very easy to use casually and in the long run, I believe that casual users will find less value in social media than those who plan and strategize their efforts.

In my opinion, social media efforts are treated casually for one of the same reasons that makes them attractive to begin with: they’re free. We pay nothing for Facebook, Twitter or your blog, so we don’t respect it or treat it as if we had  money on the line. If we were paying good money for radio, television or print media we’d make darn sure that our presentation was on target, professional looking and that our message correlated directly with our sales programs and marketing efforts elsewhere. We’d make sure that we made a strong effort to get results.

That means that you need to treat social media in the same way that you’d treat a traditional advertising or marketing campaign. Essentially, you should be treating social media as it you were spending a lot of money on it!

At World Class Beverages, my overall plan for social media looks like something like this:

• Consistently post relevant content on Facebook and Twitter.
• Post timely content related to our current sales goals and objectives, which change monthly.
• Define monthly goals for social media that are directly related to sales (i.e. sell x amount of cases this month via social media).
• Measure results relative to monthly goals as accurately as possible.

Not all of these things are easy to define and that’s yet another hurdle. But in the end, I don’t think we’re being honest with ourselves where social media for business is concerned unless we are able to do all of the above.

What can you do to to vet or qualify your fans and followers to make sure they meet those requirements?

Facebook is pretty simple. For starters, you’re using a Facebook Page for your business and not a personal profile, correct? If you are not using a Facebook Page you’re already making a mistake that needs to be rectified. Beyond that, Facebook collects a lot of information about its members, including their age, so Facebook knows how old your potential page fans are.

All you need to do is to edit your page settings to make your page visible to only people over the legal drinking age. Facebook makes that easy. Go to Page Edit, then Settings and change your Age Restrictions to “Alcohol-Related”. Facebook will then restrict access to your page and limit access only to people who claim to be of legal drinking age in their country of residence. For the United States, that age is 21.

Twitter is a little tougher because Twitter does not collect age or country of residence data in any sort of systematic way. In fact, it has been estimated that only about 4% of Twitter users have accurately volunteered their ages, so you will never really know the ages of your followers. Twitter does “require” that users be at least 13 years of age, but that doesn’t really help us.

However, you can “vet” your new Twitter followers with a service that I use called SocialOomph. Simply create a free account with SocialOomph.com, then follow their pretty simple instructions to “vet” your new followers. In short, this method allows for an automated message or disclaimer to be sent to any new follower informing them that you will only accept followers who are age 21 or over. Just remember that your message will have to fall under the 140 character Twitter limit!

If you like, you can use the automated SocialOomph.com message to ask people to respond to you to verify that they are 21 or over. New followers who do not respond to such a message should be blocked from your Twitter account. This method takes a little more work on your part that just sending out an automated disclaimer, but it is not that hard to do.

If you are blogging on an alcohol related topic, it’s a great idea to make sure that your blog header warns potential readers that you only welcome those who are 21 or older to your site.

Of course, there is no fool-proof way to verify anyone’s age. False claims can be made and I.D.’s can be faked, but none of that eliminates our responsibility to do our best to verify that we are in compliance with federal, state and local laws in a heavily regulated industry. Don’t let a lack of doing something simple now make it harder later for you to do business later!

Here’s an example. Nestle has a Facebook page. Nestle is also known to use palm oil in their products. Harvesting palm oil requires cutting down a lot of trees, many of them located in the rainforests that provide us with oxygen and help with climate control. So the Nestle Facebook page became the target of some criticism for this practice. In the end, Nestle made a bad situation worse by responding poorly to the criticism.

Instead of responding with concern and compassion, Nestle dismissed concerns and tried to bury them by deleting them. That practice simply egged on Nestle critics who responded with bigger and bolder criticisms that eventually spilled into the mainstream media. Nestle lost the PR battle.

Sadly, Nestle missed a golden opportunity to turn a negative into a positive, or at least missed a chance to limit the damage. The criticism that Nestle dismissed early on could have been turned to the company’s advantage had they been a little more open minded at the outset.

Nestle could have easily responded by telling the world that their critics had a point. Nestle even had a plan for moving away from palm oil and they could have explained that to the world! For years, Nestle has been aware of the environmental impact of palm oil use and has been working with other companies to develop sources of sustainable palm oil and yet somehow, they failed to make that a major topic in that conversation!

Show people that you care, even in bad circumstances, and you can be a hero!

Let’s face it, we’re all good at getting compliments and love to have positive comments posted about us online. But it isn’t realistic to think that we’re perfect or that everyone will say nice things about us all the time. But instead of sweeping criticism under the rug or trying to dismiss it, take the comments of your detractors seriously and respond to them like you are taking them seriously.

In the end, you cannot control what people are saying about you, nor should you try. But when people are talking about you in a negative manner, don’t you want to know about it? And don’t you want to be in a position to answer those criticisms?

I don’t feel compelled to allow obscene postings, but outside of that I’ll allow for free speech and respond as thoughtfully as I can to all.

I want to thank Emily Molitor and her blog posting called Dear Nestlé: Social media is a double-edged sword for the information that started this post. Please read Emily’s blog for more information on how a negative customer service situation turned into a disaster.

Here are some observations on how I would view good content at several social media touchpoints including Twitter, Facebook and a blog.

TWITTER -

You’ve got 140 characters, max, to make a point. So keep it simple. In fact, try to limit yourself to 120 characters, making it easy for people to re-tweet you and perhaps add a word or two of their own in the process.

Here’s one content related guideline – tweet as often as you like, but make the tweets relevant and engaging. If the tweet isn’t relevant or engaging, don’t send it. If you have 10 important messages a day, send them all. You can even send very important ones more than once, but stagger the days and times of day that it goes out.

What should you be saying? First, just sending out the occasional in store special isn’t that interesting to people. Tell people a little bit about you, your store or your story. Get them interested in what you have to say, then let them know what in store specials you have, when you have them. Don’t make yourself just a commercial, be a person and have some character.

Examples – if you own a liquor store let people know about you.  Are second or third generation family business? Are you one of the oldest businesses on your block? How about your staff? Who’s the beer geek, cork dork or liquor expert? Send out some interesting tidbits about your products whether it be beer, wine or liquor.

FACEBOOK -

Some of the same rules apply here as in Twitter. Be a person. However, don’t post to Facebook more than once a day if avoidable. People will see you repeatedly showing up in their News Feed and you’ll become an annoyance.

Facebook is more of a “community” than Twitter in the sense that is generally more interaction. In fact, you can tell if your Facebook page is a success simply by watching to see what postings people comment on or vote to “like.” The more interaction, the better for you.

BLOG -

A blog is a public forum for you to express your views on any number of topics. The blog has the advantage of being easily search able by most search engines, so it can also suffice as a website. In fact, many free blog websites out there (WordPress, for example) offer significant ease of use and customization to the point that your WordPress blog page can look just like your normal website, along with the advantage of being free. WordPress is also easy for you to work with or to let others in your organization work for you.

First,if you do not have Adobe Photoshop or something similar with which to design your custom background, don’t worry. There are free online services that will help you to create your background. One of the most popular of those services is TwitBack. TwitBack is free, easy to use and will allow you to create a pretty good looking custom image.

For those of you who have Adobe Photoshop or similar software, it is not too hard to create a very good looking custom background. There are a lot of very good free tutorials on that process at YouTube. One video tutorial that helped me is included here.

Here are a couple of tips that are really important to remember when creating your custom background.

• Once you create an image, it is easy to upload it to Twitter from your Twitter account at the Settings page from the menu in the upper right part of the Twitter home page. Go to Settings, then Design, then Change Background Image.
• Twitter does not allow you to upload any image larger than 800k. Frankly, I’ve had trouble uploading and using anything bigger than 700k, so I would stick to less than 700k for an image size.
• For your business, you might want to consider adding your web address, physical address and hours to your image. Think of it like a Yellow Pages listing!
• What you see yourself is not necessarily what your customer sees. A relatively safe strategy is to keep important information in your custom Twitter background within 175 pixels of the left hand column. However, high resolution monitors that can display very wide images will give you some additional real estate to the right hand side of your screen. A good example of using the right hand real estate (for those who can see it) is from the Twitter page of Alyssa Milano. Notice that the important info she wants to share is crunched into the left hand column, but she also shares some cute pics of herself to the far right.

Cheers!

Second, I just happened across an article titled “Is the Twitter Era Finally Coming to and End?” A pretty provocative title, to be sure, and one title of many similar titles that leads many people to assume that Twitter is dying, wilting or otherwise losing ground. But rest assured that the title is crafted to be provocative based on the overwhelming success that Twitter continues to have.

At the moment, Twitter is enjoying unparalleled success and usage that continues to grow. In other words, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain who calls attention to himself by declaring Twitter dead!

The truth about Twitter – The same article on Twitter that I just read asking if the Twitter era was over says this about Twitter: “Twitter has become sort of part of the fabric of the event” (referring to the recent South by Southwest Tech conference, aka SXSW) and “Twitter probably still has the upper hand here and certainly outside of SXSW.” Rest assured that Twitter is going strong and will be around for a while. But when the Twitter era really does end, it will be because something better and more useful will have taken its place. Social marketing in its various forms has been going on for millennia and will continue after Twitter.

When Twitter goes under, those of us who are working social media to the advantage or our customers and ourselves will be ready to step right into Twitter’s replacement. Lastly, perhaps I need to create a social media blog for the alcohol industry? Any thoughts? I could post this sort of material there for your reference, plus you’d have access to archives and related articles pretty easily.

Cheers! Bob Mack @worldclass bmack@worldclassbeverages.com