Monday, August 28, 2017

Report: 55 percent of consumers complain on social media to see results

When traditional customer-service avenues don’t offer a solution, many consumers turn to social media.

After trying to resolve a problem via phone, emailing or an in-person interaction, many would suggest calling out the organization on Twitter or Facebook—wherever someone might actually listen.

Some consumers even take to online channels first. The last thing these brand managers want is a PR crisis that extended from a social media post gone viral.

Airing customer service grievances online has become increasingly common. Forty-six percent of consumers say they’ve used a social platform to call out an organization, according to a recent Sprout Social study titled, “Call-Out Culture: People, Brands & the Social Media Power Struggle.”

The trend of confronting organizations online is believed to be making brand managers more conscientious. The survey found that 81 percent of consumers believe that social media has made organizations more accountable. Think about it: If you understand how ruinous a bad customer experience can be, you want to avoid them at all costs.

There are good reasons why consumers call out brands on social platforms, and sometimes, it’s the only way to see action.

[RELATED: Join us for the Social Media #Mashup at Disneyland.]

Sprout Social reported that 55 percent of consumers who complain to organizations via social media do it because they want apologies or solutions, but that’s not the most common reason. Most (70 percent) do it because they want to inform other consumers about the problem and raise awareness.

Next to in-person complaints (55 percent), social media (47 percent) has become the second-most common channel for consumers to voice concerns and ask questions. Email (42 percent) and phone (35 percent) are also popular avenues.

PR and marketing pros should take the results of this study to heart in order to improve the way they listen to customers. If your organization doesn’t see social media as a primary point of contact for resolving customer issues, you run the risk of going viral for all the wrong reasons.

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Meet the RE Founder: Chad Torstenson from ShowPal

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with the founder of ShowPal, Chad Torstenson.

Without further ado…

What do you do?

I am the Founder and CEO of RoHo Technologies and our go to market brand ShowPal.  As a start up company my role is fairly diverse with time currently spent on product development, marketing and ultimately customer acquisition.

What problem does your product/service solve?

ShowPal has 1 product in the market and another product that will be live very shortly.  Our first product is ShowPal ID.  ShowPal ID provides an on-the-go identity verification solution for real estate professionals.  Every year real estate agents are the victim of crimes such as robbery, assault and homicide. ShowPal ID allows an agent to email a new client a digital ID verification request.  The new client simply opens the link and follows the directions.  It takes under 2 minutes for a new client to complete the process from their mobile phone.  We use a triple verification algorithm to ensure a person is who they say they are before an agent meets them for the first time.  Our goal is to utilize this solution to keep real estate agents safer.  An individual intending to commit a crime would likely not go through an ID verification and would move on to an agent not requesting ID verification prior to meeting them. ShowPal ID is available to individual agents as well as brokerages or MLS associations that want to add the solution as a perk to their agents or members.

Our second and soon to launch product is ShowPal Home IQ.  This product can tell any buyer or buyer’s agent whatever they want to know about a home. It works on the Amazon Echo platform so all a buyer or buyer’s agent has to do is ask a question and the device will programmatically answer any question that they may ask during a physical home showing.  ShowPal Home IQ is incredibly powerful solution as it has the ability to answer a question with a voice response or show and send the interested party any image, graphic or document to support the question.  The possibilities are endless in what the product can support.  For example, say a buyer is taking a tour and they want a copy of the home owners association bylaws. They would simply ask the device to send them the HOA bylaws and our solution pulls the document from the cloud and allows them to instantly pull up the document on their smart phone by scanning the QR code provided on the screen after the request. We can deliver diverse content or any document that the listing agent feels may be of value during the showing.  Our goal is quite simple.  We want buyers to leave a showing with offers, not unanswered questions!

What are you most excited about right now?

ShowPal is a technology company and we want to position the company and solutions we develop to be a value add for all stakeholders in the real estate transaction.  We are somewhat agnostic to who perceives this value but it is paramount to us that our solutions truly provide value.   Our platform is a evolving ecosystem centered on the home showing experience and beyond.  Technology has tremendous potential to augment what a real estate professional does and make friction points in the industry less painful while serving the consumer more efficiently.  We want the real estate industry to embrace meaningful technology and I think we are well positioned for a synergistic relationship.

What’s next for you?

ShowPal wants to build an ecosystem in real estate tech.  We have already built solutions that can provide identity verification of an individual and deliver content, data or documents on a home on-demand via artificial intelligence.  With this said, several high-tech brokerages or i-buyer platforms are using or investigating the possibility of allowing buyers perform an home tour with or without a real estate agent present. How does the incumbent industry compete with high tech, low commission brokerages or platforms?  To answer this,  ShowPal is currently working on an access control solution that will allow agents or brokerages to add the ability for screened and trusted homebuyers to take autonomous home tours with the full support of ShowPal’s other products.  There are generational differences is how a homebuyer wants to tour a home.  If our platform is able to drive foot traffic to a home because autonomous tours were allowed then the ShowPal ecosystem became the best marketing tool a home could have.  We are excited about what we have planned but we want the real estate industry to take the journey with us.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Survival from out of hospital cardiac arrest.  Sudden cardiac arrest leads death unless someone performs compression only CPR on the victim until trained help can arrive.  Advances in post-cardiac arrest care has come a long way to nurture the brain and body back to health but a cardiac arrest victim has little chance of meaningful survival unless a family member or a bystander in the community performs high quality chest compressions on the victim.  My message to everyone is to go take a CPR class.   Saving a life is easier than you think!

Thanks to Chad for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

Meet The RE Tech EntrepreneurWe’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the RE Founder: Chad Torstenson from ShowPal appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.



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3 steps to launch an influencer marketing campaign

Are social media influencers part of your brand strategy?

Influencers are specialists who have established credibility in particular niches. For example, when Estee Lauder wanted to create a more youthful presence, the company turned to model Kendall Jenner to promote its makeup to her 75 million-plus Instagram followers.

Others have emerged as social media influencers from platforms such as YouTube and Vine. Ultimately, one’s credibility manifests itself as a large community of engaged followers.

Here are three ways to tap the power of social influencers:

1. Research. Make sure the influencer is credible and meshes well with your brand. For instance, a former contestant on “The Bachelor” might find success promoting hair vitamins and home delivery cooking boxes, but their loyal band of followers probably wouldn’t be the best target for power tools or any product that clashes with their reality TV persona.

[RELATED: Ragan creates custom content, from white papers to emails to intranets and more! Find out what our team can do for you.]

2. Start small. Be careful not to jump blindly into a partnership just to land a big name. It's important to spend time and resources on an influencer who shares your brand’s vision and whose followers will do the same. Kendall Jenner might be difficult to reach anyway.

3. Mix personalities. When looking to attract and connect with your influencers' followers, incorporate your influencers' personalities into your content. DJ Khaled and Venus Williams, newfound almond milk lovers, for example, have established a successful partnership with Silk.

Maintaining authenticity is important when creating partnerships. Showcasing an influencer's connection to your brand is a great way to do just that.

Lauren Pershke is an account coordinator at Largemouth Communications. A version of this article originally appeared on the agency’s blog.

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How Twitter emerged as a key comms channel during Harvey

Desperate times call for desperate—and perhaps non-traditional—measures.

Hurricane Harvey has wreaked havoc in and around Houston as historic flooding continues.

The Washington Post reported:

Even as the storm had been blamed for several deaths, the full toll of the storm remained unclear. Officials warned that the danger was far from over, saying that the flooding in Texas is unlikely to recede quickly and that the storm will force more than 30,000 people from their homes. Federal officials, meanwhile, widened the emergency zone to Louisiana.

“We are not out of the woods yet,” Elaine Duke, the acting Homeland Security secretary, said during a Monday morning briefing in Washington. “Harvey is still a dangerous and historic storm.”

The National Weather Service tweeted:

As many caught in the storm’s path turned to Twitter for help, the U.S. Coast Guard told people to call instead of tweet:

[FREE GUIDE: Keep your cool in a crisis with these 13 tips.]

Several Twitter users criticized the directive, pointing out that those trapped with dying cellphones couldn’t continue holding to talk to authorities. Many offered to call for those tweeting their distress.





Some have set up Twitter accounts just for the natural disaster to aid in recovery, and other people and organizations have tweeted lists of resources and alternative ways to get help:

TechCrunch reported:

The Coast Guard’s request is understandable because using social media as a platform for emergency calls can lead to calls for help getting overlooked, misidentification, the spread of false information and even fraud .

For desperate people who can’t reach call centers or recharge their phones, however, social media may be one of the few options they have and requests for help spread on Twitter or Facebook have already helped several Hurricane Harvey victims, including residents of a flooded assisted living center in Dickinson, Texas . Reddit users have also been gathering information about the hurricane compiled mostly from Twitter in a live thread

Though to many PR pros, using traditional methods such as phone lines is a natural crisis response, Hurricane Harvey has shown how effective social media platforms can be in organizing and mobilizing response efforts—especially when traditional methods are clogged.

Spreading information more quickly

Beyond affecting rescue efforts, Twitter is also helping organizations in Harvey’s path to get out important information.

FEMA advised people in the Houston area to follow the City of Houston Office of Emergency Management on Twitter for updates:

The National Weather Service in Houston has been tweeting updates such as flash flood and tornado warnings in both English and Spanish:

Other organizations, such as the Corpus Christi Police Department , the City of Houston and Houston Police have turned to Twitter to keep citizens informed.

Expanding the reach and effectiveness of donations

Twitter has offered people and businesses the opportunity to make a difference in the disaster relief effort through pledges and funds.

Organizations and public figures such as Amazon, Starbucks, “Good Morning America” and Houston Texans defensive end JJ Watt—have tweeted their support and ways to help:

GoFundMe has centralized Hurricane Harvey collection requests on one page:

How have you seen Twitter used to support rescue and relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey?

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Announcing the winners of PR Daily’s 2017 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards

 

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5 facets of compelling copy

Your content deserves recognition, but how do you grab attention when there is a staggering amount of competition for the same eyeballs?

The answer is to make sure everything you produce is energetic, enticing and useful enough to cut through the clutter. Your content should compel readers to take notice and take action. Of course, you also want them to want to return.

Here are five tips to help you in that endeavor:

1. Write a compelling headline.

Headlines and subject lines often make or break your content. As Larry Kim writes on Medium:

Your headlines shouldn’t be an afterthought. Content that has a catchy headline is more likely to be clicked on and read. A boring headline pretty much guarantees nobody will read that piece of content you spent so much time writing.

Kim makes the case for emotional words and phrases in headlines. “Emotions make people click and engage,” he writes, and he uses data to make the case for specific phrases, including “make you cry,” “melt your heart,” “give you goosebumps,” and “can’t stop laughing.”

[FREE GUIDE: 10 ways to improve your writing today.]
2. Use sentence length to vary the rhythm of your writing.

“Short and broken sentences add energy to your writing,” writes Henneke at Enchanting Marketing, who compares writing to composing music:

To change the mood in a musical piece, a legato playing style can be interrupted by a few notes of staccato. The same is true in writing. When you only write long sentences, you slowly lull your reader to sleep. By interrupting a calming flow with a few ultra-short sentences, you attract attention to your point. You wake your reader up.

3. Use active voice.

Phil Jamieson, on Business 2 Community, provides a vivid example of how perilous the passive voice can be:

‘You are loved.’ Writing that in a valentine to your beloved instead of ‘I love you’ likely will have a similar effect as giving a bouquet of roses with petals that are curling and turning brown—the thought may be there, but the desired effect loses some of its impact. That’s what can happen with passive voice.

In addition to being a romance destroyer, the passive voice kills energy. Passive voice makes it unclear who is performing the action (or feeling the emotion).

The passive voice does have a place in writing, though. “Sometimes you want or need the subject to be ambiguous or want to emphasize the object, in which case passive constructions make sense,” Jamieson says, “but too often writers use passive voice unconsciously, leading to awkward, vague or bloated sentences that make the meaning harder to understand.”

4. Envision your reader as being extremely impatient.

“It’s easy to think your readers are browsing for fun and enjoyment,” writes Hassan Ud-deen at Problogger. “That they’ll read every word of your post, but that’s just not true.”

Ud-deen suggests picturing a reader “who is juggling a screaming baby on his lap, has dozens of tasks to finish, and is ready to click on that big red ‘X’ button the second your post doesn’t provide the solution to his problems. This simple mindset shift will help you create more reader-friendly content from the get go. You’ll be sure to keep his pains and problems in mind, which means you’re less likely to have fluffy, bloated writing that bores his ear off.”

5. Provide answers.

According to Zach Bulygo and Sean Work, writing on the Kissmetrics blog, people consume content for the same reason they read nonfiction or use search engines—to find answers to their questions.

“Read any title and subtitle of a non-fiction book or article. Ultimately, what it leaves the reader with is a question or a sense of curiosity,” they write. “It is then the author’s job to deliver answers and have supporting information.”

They advise content creators to write with their visitors’ questions—and answers—in mind.

“When people are reading a blog post, viewing an infographic or watching a video, they want an answer so they can gain knowledge,” they write. “Make your content easy to scan so people can pick up the juicy, important bits quickly.”

Kristen Dunleavy is the senior content marketing manager for Moveable Ink. A version of this post first appeared on Moveable Ink’s blog.

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Sunday, August 27, 2017

The value of print in today’s marketing

Marketing, like a healthy diet, requires variety and balance.

Digital efforts constitute the main course of our current marketing diet, but Vistaprint Corporate’s infographic reminds us that a sensible portion of print still deserves room on our plates.

Print is expensive, but it has science-backed advantages over online content. The infographic cites research that print pieces top digital ads in cognitive categories such as review time, emotional reaction, memory retention and perceived value.

Print advertisements are also easy on the brain. The graphic says print materials garner “70 percent higher recall” and that it takes “21 percent less cognitive effort” to process print pieces.

[EVENT: Join us for the Brand Storytelling and Content Marketing Conference at The Coca-Cola Company]

In addition, print scores points for response and open rates. The infographic cites a study that found direct-mail pieces enjoyed a 37 percent higher open rate than emails. Postcards received a 4.25 percent response rate, compared with 0.1 percent for email.

Digital marketing is the present and future, but print remains effective—almost 600 years on from Mr. Gutenberg’s transformative invention.

Check out the infographic below to learn more about why we shouldn’t quit print.

Infographic: Here's why you need to step your print marketing game up



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