Many companies are often afraid of getting into social media because it seems uncontrollable.

Social media gives your business an opportunity to increase interaction and be closer to your every-day consumer, but those conversations can be tough to control sometimes. The big challenge is crisis management: responding to negative feedback quickly and turn your customers into brand advocates.

Many people like to share their positive experience with a brand online. They tell their friends how wonderful the customer service is at company A or how great the discounts are at company B. Unfortunately, a lot more people are likely to share their negative experiences online. Social media makes it easier for an angry customer to bash your brand online and be heard (or even supported) within minutes by hundreds of people.

At the same time, social media, if done right, can be a great crisis management tool – it can help you address the issue and quickly deal with negative feedback.

Don’t be afraid of someone bad-mouthing your brand. Like I said before, the fact that people are talking about your brand (even if it’s not good) means that they care. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent time telling you about their bad experience and would have been off doing business with your competitors.

Today, more and more people realize that they have the power to affect how business is done. Most of them don’t publish negative feedback online just because, they usually have a purpose – to be heard.

If you spend enough time listening to what people say about your brand online, you can learn a lot about what is working and what’s not. Listening is a big part of successful crisis management. Are the buyers praising the special discounts you have just announced, or maybe a lot of them are unhappy with your customer service?

Make sure you address the complaints in a short period of time. The longer you wait, the more frustrated and angry your customers may become. Especially if the same issue has been brought up several times.

And again, don’t be afraid that someone might say bad things about your company. It happens to everyone. What will differentiate your business from others is how you handle the issue.

Have you had a situation when you had to deal with negative feedback online? How did you handle it?

Great communities inspire great conversations. Online communities are no different.

Fred Wilson once said in his blog, “modern [online] community building isn’t easy, but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredibly powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work.”

One of the definitions of the word “community” is “body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a large society.”

The Internet allows people with common interests, be it Mac enthusiasts or IT people, come together even if they are “scattered through a large society.” People always want to belong to some kind of community where they can share their thoughts, opinions and interests with others.

Every business has the opportunity to take advantage of this phenomenon and unite their customers and fans in an online community with a common interest – their brand.

Many brands build online communities hoping that it would be an easier way to talk to their customers. They keep creating and pushing content out to their fans, failing to realize that many of them join an online community not because they want to listen to brands, but rather talk and share their experiences with each other.

Online communities can generate valuable content for your brand if you would just let your fans talk. Their opinions might not always be positive, but the fact that your fans talk about you already means they are interested in your business. And even negative feedback can be turned into a learning experience. Just make sure to address those comments in a timely manner (watch for a blog post on crisis management soon).

Sephora’s “Beauty Talk” online community on the website had exactly that result: “we realized that…clients were not only trying to talk with us – they were trying to talk with each other. And they were actually engaging in ways we had no idea they would,” said the VP of interactive media at Sephora.

A strong online community, where people have the freedom to express their opinions and know they are being heard, nurtures community leaders that can become brand advocates both online and offline.

Facebook is a great platform for your business to start building online communities. It is important to give your customers a voice, even though it might be uncomfortable at first. Ask questions, encourage conversations, monitor and listen. Your fans have a lot to say about your brand, don’t limit their ability to interact with each other and with you.

Social music sharing has been around for quite a while now, with services such as Ping, Pandora, Grooveshark, Rdio, Spotify and others.

Now Turntable.fm, a startup released in May, has taken online music sharing to a whole another level, hitting 140,000 users in the first month.

It is similar to Second Life in some way, letting you create your own avatar, walk around, communicate with other users and create/share content.

Turntable.fm is a browser-based music streaming platform that allows you to share your favorite tracks and chat with others in real time. The service lets you create a list of tracks you want to spin from the music library, supplied by MediaNet, or upload your own mp3’s (the legality of this is still in question).

Every virtual room allows up to 5 DJ’s at a time, and if you get a spot, you can play your favorite tracks to the crowd. DJ’s in each “room” take turns playing music and everyone else can vote on each song, hitting either “lame” or “awesome” button at the bottom of the screen. Enough “lames” will get a song to skip; the “awesome” button makes your avatar bob your head and gives a DJ more points.

Besides the main purpose of sharing music, the service has the gaming aspect to it – the more DJ points you earn, the more options you will have to make your avatar really stand out in a crowd.

The fact that you can’t choose your own music lineup makes this service more similar to Pandora that functions on the same “online radio” basis.

The long-awaited release of the Turntable.fm iPhone app took the virtual DJ’ing out of home/office and to the streets (or pretty much anywhere you happen to have your iPhone). So far the app only works well with a Wi-Fi connection and has a few other glitches that the company is currently in the process of fixing.

Seems like it’s not going to be long until the service will start looking for ways to make money from sponsorships, and many up-and-coming artists might be likely to jump on that opportunity.

Turntable.fm is great for promotional reasons – it lets users discover a multitude of tracks and find artists they like. However, the service limits the number of times the same artist can be played in one “room,” making it difficult for a single band to promote their music, or for a venue to promote an upcoming concert.

As long as the service stays legal, it doesn’t hurt the music industry, but it is still too early to judge how much real profit the music industry might actually gain from the platform registered (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) as a “non-interactive” music service, and whose business model is currently “under construction.”

We’ve talked before about three screeners. You know, that plugged-in, slightly undead segment of society that talks about what they’re watching on TV live with their friends online and via text. Heck, we’re part of it.

Marketers are looking to get a piece of that sweet chatter pie, and I haven’t seen an attempt more creative than the social media technology that comes with the second season of the HBO series True Blood on Blu Ray.

If you’re not familiar, the show is a horror/melodrama about hillbilly vampires in the American south. Or something. It’s sexy, it’s bitey, Anna Paquin is in it. There.

With this interactive Blu Ray, viewers are able to upload their photos and see an image of themselves becoming more vampiric as the season progresses.

They’re also able to post Twitter and Facebook updates about the show using their custom True Blood portrait as their avatar, share scenes and win virtual prizes.

That’s a pretty clever way of infiltrating customers’ social streams and creating viral buzz. And an apt one, given that the show is about people biting each other and passing along a sexy condition.

Will you get bit? More importantly, would you even bother to push what are essentially ads for a show from your Blu Ray out to your social networks?

I gotta admit, if something like this had come with The Sopranos or The Wire — and had been done well — I just might’ve handed my personal brand over to Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell.

I mean, really, has TV ever been better than it is now?

[Via]

What a sad image.

Picture a shopping cart, loaded with a 40-inch HD TV, a Blu-Ray player and the entire fourth season of Weeds, just left there unattended in the middle of Best Buy. Forever. No one knows who abandoned this feast of hi-fi entertainment or why.

This tragedy occurs all the time in the world of online commerce, and retailers are always looking for ways of reducing it.

And more and more of them are using the power of video.

A new eMarketer report titled “Video E-Commerce: Innovative Models Drive Sales” shows that online video use jumped 378% in 2009 over the previous year among the top 50 U.S. online retailers.

Though customer reviews are still king, according to the report, more and more big shops are finding that videos boost conversion rates, reduce product returns, build brand identity and keep those digital shopping carts zipping through the checkout lanes.

I’m not sure if Zappos was surveyed for the report, but the consistently awesome shoe seller produces tons of video and social content to build customer loyalty and move shoes. Here’s one of many hilarious videos from the Zappos TV blog.

Have you ever been on the fence about an online purchase and had your mind changed by a video?

For those who have not been to Kansas City, Kansas, “tourism” is not a word that springs to mind when you visit KCMO’s sister to the west. I like KCK a lot, don’t get me wrong. But to the outsider unaware of the town’s hidden gems, words like “blight,” “depression” and “inertia” are far more likely to come up.

It’s towns like KCK that need social media the most.

Because despite its rough outer edges, the crown jewel of Wyandotte County boasts some of the best ethnic eateries, local heritage fests, an amazing annual music tradition in the Street Blues Festival, plus top-notch destinations around the Legends at Village West, which is the home to the Wizards and the T-Bones — potentially the area’s only winning pro sports teams. (Note: They’re building a new stadium for the Wizards.)

From a tourism perspective, it’s a challenge to sell KCK. Despite these great attractions, the town has its obvious hurdles, and chances are very great that the Wyandotte County Tourism and Visitors Bureau doesn’t have the budget to pay a PR or ad agency to come in and give the place a makeover.

That’s why it’s so great that the Bureau is using DIY-style social media to tell KCK’s story and highlight its better sides.

Even though she was born last summer and won a national award for her Summer Scoop campaign, I didn’t hear about Dottie until yesterday. I got to attend an awards luncheon put on by the Tourism Bureau, and at everyone’s place setting was an ice cream scoop with a card tied to it listing the social media destinations for this summer’s “Dottie’s Inside Scoop” campaign: blog, Facebook page, Twitter and YouTube.

They showed this trailer at the luncheon. It was probably one of the first “web 2.0″ styled videos many of the smalltown businessmen and politicians in the room had seen, and I’m not exaggerating. (For me, it was the first WMV formatted video I’ve seen in a while, if that tells you anything about the tools they have to work with for this campaign.) After the video ended, the Tourisim Bureau lady hosting the lunch felt compelled to explain that, yes, the video didn’t look professional, but that’s how it’s supposed to be.

In any case, I like where KCK is going with this. Sure, it could be executed better. (I’d like Dottie to keep the camera rolling, forget the slideshows and improvise more.) But for a struggling city that desperately needs to promote its best points on a tight budget, this is definitely the way to go.

I just hope Dottie hits El Camino Real for some tacos this summer. That place is unreal.

Ever gone to the store only to find they’re all out of your favorite brand of razor blades (Gillette Mach 3 Turbo)? Or driven out to the nearest Best Buy to get a certain digital camera (Canon Powershot Digital Elph) and discovered they have the display model but none in stock?

Or what if you needed a tie for a wedding and wanted to get it from one of those great, old-school downtown tailors?

Your dad would’ve grabbed the yellow pages and began dialing up “human beings.” But you don’t have time for that. In fact, it’s tempting just to buy everything online… But wait, there’s a solution!

Since exiting beta in December of last year, Milo.com has been helping users find out exactly what’s on the racks of local stores before they leave home.

Milo.com’s aim is to help brick-and-mortar shops “fight back” by converting “online browsers into in-store shoppers.” Driving a reported 100,000 sales a day, Milo searches some 48,000 stores for 2.8 million products. Though, of course, the only ones that matter are the ones nearest you.

Though the site has mostly been listing national retailers, last week, Milo began adding product listings for mom-and-pops. Venturebeat suggests this is a reaction to Google’s moving into the local-search-shopping space via its Blue Dot Specials mobile app.

But whatever the case, we love just about any online tool that helps us connect with our local retail community.

Also, Milo.com seems to get the impact of social media on shopping.

There aren’t any social features on the site to speak of, but an entry on the company’s blog talks about ways people are using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Blippy to enable and enhance their shopping experience.

Just more ways the web is directly leading people to walk out their own front doors and into those of local businesses.

At LP, we kinda like Facebook ads. First of all, they’re more relevant than just about any other ads in the universe besides Google ads. That’s because they target users based on their profile information.

Further, by liking and unliking them, you can tailor them to your tastes — and weed out those borderline offensive beauty ads that pop up in your stream like digital cockroaches.

The bean counters at Nielsen have just published a study that gives insight into the value of using Facebook to advertise, both through paying for ads and through “earned media,” where users organically pass the marketing message along to their friends.

Working with Facebook’s in-house researchers, Nielsen surveyed over 800,000 Facebook users and 125 individual campaigns from 70 brand advertisers. The full report, “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of Social Media Advertising” is downloadable here (in exchange for a smattering of your marketing information).

The survey looked at three kinds of ads along a continuum of inorganic to organic: (1) The plain homepage ad that you pay for; (2) the homepage ads with “social context,” meaning friends of yours who have become a fan of the brand; and (3) “earned media” social stories, which are the notifications of friend activity that appear in a user’s timeline.

Nielsen found that in terms of customer ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent, Facebook ads that contained social context ruled over ads that didn’t.

That’s not really surprising, is it? The message here is that we trust our friends’ recommendations way more than we trust an image on a screen, however targeted that image may be.

In fact, as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been polling my Facebook friends about what kind of coffee maker I should buy to replace my leaky old Mr. Coffee.

Your move, Cuisinart.

What do you think of Twitter’s new revenue model?

Since launching four years ago, Twitter has grown to handling 50 million tweets per day — the 140-character-maximum messages that constitute the central, real-time feed at the heart of Twitter. Until now, the world’s biggest microblogging service had no way of making money. (It has stayed afloat thanks to $160 million in VC-backed funding.)

Now that Twitter has potentially developed a way to make money, brands and marketers that have been ignoring Twitter had better start playing catchup. This, friends, is the future.

For now, promoted tweets appear at the top of your feed when you search Twitter for a keyword that has been bought by an advertiser. Thus far, only Starbucks, Best Buy, Virgin Airlines and a few other brands have bought promoted tweets.

When you search for “coffee,” for example, here’s what shows up at the top:

The Future Is Real-Time

Mahesh Murthy at the WSJ points out the flaws in this phase of the promoted tweet model (no one uses Twitter search, only one promoted tweet at a time, to name the biggest problems), but he also argues convincingly that Twitter’s continued growth will lead to 24-7 marketing and customer relations operations. It will change the ad business.

People tweet 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve got to listen to all this – and reply in real time. And the reply can’t come from BPO service-deck folks. Trained copywriters know how to speak in a brand’s voice. Can you have your creatives give up their vodka-soaked weekends and work shifts that cover 24 x 7, because their brand’s customers do? You’ll have to.

But screw the ad agencies. They had it coming.

What does this mean for businesses looking to connect with their customers?

The Future is Talk

Granted, until Twitter develops a way of targeting users based on location, there’s no reason yet for non-national brands to rush to develop promoted tweets. But that day will come soon.

Next, unlike Facebook ads, which are targeted based not only on location but on all that profile information you fill out  — interests, place of work, groups you’re a member of, etc. — and can be tailored by users through the like/unlike system to be made even more relevant, Twitter’s new ads are keyword-based.

Though Twitter’s approach to advertising will evolve in time, the one dictum that’s important for business owners and marketers to keep in mind — nay, to start obsessing over — is this:

Know what your customers are talking about.

At all times. Night and day. Week to week. Month to month. Zeitgeist to zeitgest.

That’s all Twitter is, really: conversation. Messages on Twitter are either brief monologues shooting forth from individual keyboards, or they’re conversations between people. It’s all talk.

Even at their fullest potential, promoted tweets will always stand one step away from real-world conversation. Imagine two people sitting at a bar, talking. Suddenly, a brand message is beamed onto the forehead of one of the speakers for a second or two. Interruptive, isn’t it?

That’s what advertising is. It stands out from the conversation and says “Quit being engaged with your real life and look at this product.”

Promoted tweets will probably make money for Twitter. That’s their purpose.

But for those who stand to profit from it, there is no substitute for talking in a transparent, human level.

There’s no buying into the conversation.

Forget Monopoly or pinochle. When I was growing up, coupon-clipping was the family’s parlor sport of choice. My dad’s bulky coupon wallet dictated where we’d go out to eat, when we’d go places like the zoo or museums and, essentially, what we would consume as a family.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking of coupons, especially those found in newspapers or in those annoying inserts I get in my mailbox every other week, as belonging to a bygone era.

But according to findings by Nielsen, coupon usage has surged dramatically in the current economic recession.

As “The Coupon Comeback” reports, coupon redemption fell off between 1999 and 2008, from 4.6 billion per year to 2.6 billion.

But in 2009, coupon use surged by 27%, amounting to the second-highest year-over-year jump ever recorded.

The highest growth sector was Internet coupon redemption, which grew by 263%. Newspaper inserts are still alive and well, though, accounting for 89% of coupons and 53% of redemption. This chart shows the biggest growers:

What’s also interesting: The wealthier the household, the more likely they are to clip coupons.

Or look at Groupon. The online/e-mail-based deal-a-day enterprise is hotter than those 4-for-1 jalapenos in the produce section, and only getting hotter — TechCrunch reports Groupon may have just received another $1.2 billion in funding in addition to the $250m it received late last year.

What This Means for Social Marketing

This one’s officially a no-brainer.

Customers are looking to save money. Your community loves you, but they don’t always want to pay full price. How can you use your social channels — Facebook, Twitter, your company blog — to distribute virtual coupons to your community?

Here’s one idea: Design a downloadable jpeg coupon and post it as a Wall photo on Facebook. Ask people first to “like” the photo, then print it and bring it in — or, better yet, ask them to show it on their smart phones (to save trees). As people come in the door of your business, watch your fan count grow online.

We’re not suggesting that you high-end types get all Price Chopper on us. There are ways to offer savings without compromising brand image. In fact, as the Nielsen study showed, your wealthier customers are the most coupon-hungry.

What other ways can you build relationships with your customers while giving them a good deal?