It’s a great example of how not to do things using Twitter. That should be self-evident. Habitat have said that the use of these hashtags was not authorised, but did not say who had used them (Source: BBC News). They have since apologised for the mess up, but it seems the damage has already been done.

But it looks like people are jumping on the bandwagon and following suit.

Habitat Fail, others follow suit

See this very recent example of promoting products and services by using the conversations around the release of the Transformers 2 movie. There are many more like these on Twitter right now.

As with everything online, people will find a way to abuse the system for their own gain. Facebook went through the same, when they started letting third parties develop applications. People’s profiles were awash with invitations to “bite people as vampires”. Not today thanks, I’ve just had lunch!

So, we face a barrage of spam on Twitter against popular subjects. This erodes the credibility of Twitter and the people that tweet genuinely.

Let’s hope that Twitter do something to stop this, ASAP.

Dell’s example sets a good benchmark on how a company integrates social media tools into their business. Their next challenge is to help “revolutionise” their business.

Marketing people don’t work in customer services and customer service people don’t work in marketing; there may be good reason for that. But there will always be an argument for integrating marketing and customer service departments, or at the very least having them sat next to one another. This has never been so important as social media spreads.

How can social media help companies with bad customer service?

If you have had a bad customer service experience with a company, then you probably have felt:

• They don’t listen to your complaints
• They don’t care what you have to say
• They are only interested in themselves

These all go against the qualities needed to succeed in social media. You have to listen, engage and respond to your customers. If they are actively participating in conversations around your brand, then they have a desire to interact with your brand. Even if they are complaining, people generally complain because they want something resolved. If your product or service is that good, then chances are they want you to make it all better, so they can forgive you and start buying from you again!

Help, what do I do now?

Integrate - you might be scratching your head thinking, who is going to run our social media? Marketing or customer service? Answer: Both. At the very least, get weekly meetings between the people running your social media campaigns and your customer service department. Ideally the people running your social media campaign would straddle the two.

Monitor – use online tools or a social media agency to monitor online conversations around your brand. People online will not be coming to you to complain. Social media gives the common consumer a voice. It enables them to find other people with the same interests and concerns and discuss these. That might be positive or negative.

Listen – to what you customers are saying. Share the feedback from your social media campaigns with the customer service department. They will be able to advise on how to respond. Share feedback from the customer service department on complaints coming in from email and telephone. Pre-empt your online audience by identifying a problem and providing a solution. You’ll get points for that.

Respond - it’s no good listening and not responding. It’s a bit like talking to a brick wall; the speaker will walk away quickly. Even if you can’t provide a good response there and then, buy yourself some time. There is nothing wrong with saying you’ll get back to someone. As long as you do. Remember to respond to positive comments; these people will become greater brand advocates.

Listen again – ensure that the conversations online continue on a positive route. With social media you are opening up issues to a wider audience. You might find that someone else will jump on the band wagon if they are not happy with your response. Even though they did not start the conversation, you have to start a conversation with them.

Be careful – a brand entering a private conversation between consumers has to be careful. If the company goes about it in the wrong way, then this can do more harm than good. You need to be gentle in your approach and show the consumer that you are only interested in helping them. This is not a place for brand promotion. Leave that out!

Luckily for our clients, our business is built on a team with backgrounds in customer service and marketing, so we are experts at improving customer service through social media.

Our belief will always be that there should be one “search strategy”. That person leading the strategy should know PPC and SEO inside out. But perhaps that’s a pipe dream at the moment, given the shortage of experience SEO/PPC people in the industry.

So, before we have even managed to get to grips with that, everyone is suggesting that we now focus on search and social, eeek!

So what do we do? What with Facebook Vanity URLs coming out, there has been a flurry of blog articles coming out advising to optimise your Facebook pages and twitter profiles. Great if you are a business to optimise you brand name. Chances are that you are already number 1.

So how can SEO and social media be used to help your business?

You don’t have to be an expert at both to do the basics:

• Set up social profiles – sign up to Facebook and Twitter. Both are free and are easy to set up.
  • Optimise Facebook – get fans, build interest, get your facebook vanity URL, link from your profile page to your website.
  • Optimise Twitter – get your twitter account and get it optimised for your business name .
• Blog - blogging is a great way of building interest around your business. Write articles around the latest industry news and optimise them well for key search terms and link out to other areas of your site.
• Create valuable content – this one is very important. Making interesting and relevant content for your audience will set you apart form the competition.
• Make your content portable – make any content you produce for your site shareable. Videos, whitepapers, gadgets, images, etc. are a great way to get people to link to your site. Getting inbound links is great for improving your rankings.
• Learn about SEO – the basics of social media are easy, it’s about being social online. But learning about how SEO works can help improve your basic knowledge.
• Get engaged – spend time with your customers, get to know them online. They will naturally want to tell others about you online. More links, better rankings.
• Get involved – get involved with other blogs and networks. Submit stories other than your own and be an active participant.
• Let everyone know – get yourself out there doing the following:
  • Submit your stories to Digg ,Reddit and Propeller
  • Get fans and share your stories on Facebook
  • Tweeter about your latest article
  • Get blogged about

There’s no golden rules here. You need to understand SEO and social media to pull it off. But word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool and if you create deep engagement with your customers/users then this will pay off. Once you have that it’s understanding how to harness the power of this through SEO, something you may want to consider using an search agency for.

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

For those who don’t know, Facebook has given users the opportunity to register a “vanity URL”. Up until now there’s been no easy way to share your Facebook page with anyone. With vanity URLs, once you have registered, people can find you by going to www.facebook.com/YourUsername. Fear not, your privacy settings will remain the same, so for those who are a little concerned with protecting their identities, you’re OK!

The idea is that it makes your Facebook profile shareable with other people. This means you can start sending it to all your friends, posting it on twitter and so on. It will also make your Facebook profile indexable by the search engines. Not that they haven’t been before, but it will mean that your profile will be more likely to rank highly for your username.

Companies/famous people etc. with over 1,000 fans will be able to register their user names, something that is more significant than Joe Bloggs being able to register www.facebook.com/joebloggs. This has given rise to the rather unfortunate phrase “face squatting”. A term that was bounded around twitter a lot yesterday in an attempt to get CNN to use the phrase in their news reports. Not sure if that was successful!

I digress, so with the fear that brands will not be able to register their trademark names, Facebook set up a “pre-register”. It did state that this was no guarantee and that no response would be given to your pre-registering. It clearly shows that Facebook are preparing themselves for some legal battles much like Google had when they removed trademark bidding in the UK. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there!

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

• Get your Facebook vanity URL (FYI, you must be logged in to Facebook).
• Read about The Digital Consultant’s online marketing services.

New Toyota Prius

The guys at iCrossing are at it again. If you have been following the Toyota blog then you will have seen the posts around driving the new Toyota IQ 500 miles on a full tank of petrol.

Well with the launch of the new Prius, Toyota’s first hybrid car, due soon they have taken to the road to see how far they can take the Prius on one tank of petrol. They’re aiming on getting all the way from Brighton to Scotland and back again! We wish them the best of luck!

A great example of how social media can be used to generate interest around a new car launch. Follow the story online at the Toyota Blog.

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

I asked myself this, as I looked for more information. Finally I sat myself down and watched the 1hr 20 min video of the development team eagerly showing off their new tool to a bunch of external developers. Cool, was my reaction. So, what exactly is it? Perhaps it’s:

“A web browser based communication tool that pulls in data from any source allowing for a central depository of all online activity.”

After trawling through the video, I could see that the component parts are not revolutionary, nor is the principle of Google Wave. The technology has developed to enable a talented team to start pulling these ideas together.

Component parts

So why are the component parts are not revolutionary? If we look at the main features of Google Wave, you can see clear elements of:

• Email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail)
• Instant Messaging (Live Messenger, Yahoo! IM, GTalk)
• Photo sharing (Flickr)
• Blogging (WordPress, Blogger)
• Document production (Word, Google Docs, Open Office)
• Searching (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
• Social media (Twitter, Facebook)

Nothing spectacular there,  but it does mean that you’ll be able to access all of this from one place. The ability to organise, edit and share all of this information in once place is handy and time saving. There are many advantages to having everything in one place.

Main features

What makes Google Wave so interesting are some of the features:

• Real-time – as you edit, type or review, these will be seen live by anyone else who is part of that wave.
• Portability – publish your wave content elsewhere, such as on your blog or website. Any changes made from Google Wave will be instant on your blog or website.
• Open sourced – much like the Google Maps with the ability to manipulate data, Google Wave has opened its doors to developers. This is intended to increase interaction and scalability.
• History playback – ability to see the development of a Wave in a chronological order by different users. Great for document collaboration.
• Advanced language capabilities – enhanced spell checking which looks at the context of a sentence (no more “your and you’re” errors). Also translation into 40 languages as you type!

This has got the online community going with the endless possibilities. But let us consider the immediate/short-term impact.

What does this mean to the average user?

If like me you use the majority of the previously mentioned online functions, then this type of tool will get you excited in areas I should not talk about here!

If you do not, then chances are you will think less of it.

The success of Google Wave rides on reducing the barriers of entry and making it as easy for all to use, like Google Maps which was intuitive and easy on the eye. But Google Wave relies on more than that, because it requires a network of people to communicate with. All of which is currently disseminated across the website.

The question is, how easily can we pull our data together and what’s the incentive to do so? The incentive for me is pretty obvious, but what about the average user?

Chances are people outside of the Google bubble will continue with their Hotmails, Yahoos, Facebooks, all sat miles apart, blissfully unaware of the Goliath that is growing right beneath their finger tips.

To conclude

In the online world we’ve been given all these great tools - email, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter, blogging etc. - but we need somewhere to store them, a toolbox, a storage facility. Google Wave is that storage facility. Depending on how much you use these tools will determine how big your Waves are, or whether you bother to Wave at all!

It’s not going to change the online world overnight. But it will, in the beginning, make our online presence easier and more time efficient, at least it will mine!

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

• Sign up for Google Wave updates.
• Watch the full 1hr 20 min video here: