I just saw this press release from Cone LLC touting some results of a survey they did about companies and their presence on social media sites. According to the survey:

- 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media Web site.
- 25% interact more than once per week.
- 56% of American consumers feel a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

These results are actually shocking to me, primarily because I have a hard time believing that 56% of Americans have interacted with a company using social media. I’m not sure how Cone is defining “social media” - perhaps their definition is broader than the one that I would give the term. But I really can’t believe that many companies are up and active and using social media effectively enough to have interacted with their customers using that medium.

I have heard the examples (as you have) about Comcast and Zappos using Twitter. I know that many consumer facing sites are using Facebook and MySpace. But are this many businesses really using social media enough to be communicating with their customers that way?

Apparently I’m not the only one who is perplexed by these figures. This blog post by Steven Hodson at WinExtra says it better than I would, so please link over and read his post if you’re skeptical about the numbers, too.

But taking the study at its word, this is really bad news for businesses that aren’t using social media. Those slackers better catch on immediately. According to the study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence in social media.

Photo by aeu04117

I work out of my home, so I spend a lot of time noticing its cleanliness. But I don’t have a lot of time to spend cleaning, especially because when I’m at home, I’m usually working. So I have mastered the art of keeping everything just clean enough.

If you walked into my home/office, you would think it was clean. In fact, people comment all the time about how clean it appears to be. But they don’t know my secret - that every morning I spend 5 minutes tidying up, making the bed, putting dishes in the dishwasher, throwing random clothes in the hamper. Tossing everything that doesn’t have a home into my closet and shutting the door. They don’t know that I leave dust rags in various rooms throughout the day, and as I’m on conference calls, I dust. Or fold the laundry. They don’t realize that after I wash my face, the washcloth does double-duty - it’s used to wipe down the bathroom sink and fixtures before going in the laundry.

My house isn’t always clean but it’s clean enough.

Of course there are times when my home/office gets a full-on assault with cleaning products, vacuum cleaners and mops. But those days are much rarer, and usually happen right before a party or a family visit.

I think that there is a lesson that can be applied to start-ups.

As a start-up, there are usually very scarce resources available, so it’s difficult to do things perfectly all the time. But at any given moment, a customer might be using your site for the first time. Or a potential investor might be checking out what you’re up to. Most of those people won’t dig too deep. They will just be giving your site a cursory glance, checking it out to see if it might be helpful or not. So although behind the scenes you may know that everything is kind of a mess, it’s important to keep up appearances.

What does this mean, practically? Nothing too difficult. Make sure that your Website has a professional design. Make sure that the words on your site are spelled right (mostly) and that they are grammatically correct (or at least understandable). Make sure all your links work. If something isn’t working, or looks a little shoddy, take it down.

If your business involves some kind of technology, make sure that it works. You can launch without all its future features, and still not quite working exactly like you want it to, but make sure that it works, and will not crash or be buggy if someone actually attempts to use it.

The goal, of course, is to get people who visited your site or used your technology to say, at first glance, that it looks good. They may lift up the rug and find out that what you are showing them isn’t complete, that it’s not as good as it looked at first, but you do not want to turn them off without them taking that closer look.

And honestly, most people never take the time to lift up the rugs.

There will be time to perfect things, to make sure that everything is exactly, precisely working. But until then, make sure that your appearance is good enough.

Photo by givepeasachance

How big is the World Wide Web in 2007? The answer to that question is hard to pin down, to say the least. I can find little reliable data since a report published by Berkeley in 2003 (at that time the Web had 170 terabytes of information, 17x the size of the Library of Congress), and an analysis done by Antonio Guilli in 2005 placing the number at 11.5 billion Web pages. The most recent data that I could find was an article from Pandia from February 2007 indicating that the size of the World Wide Web is somewhere between 15 and 30 billion pages, probably closer to 30 billion.

My point? The Web is big. Huge. And the best way that I know how to keep up with the new information that is being produced about my brands on a daily basis is to use Google Alerts.

This is a simple tool to use, and in my opinion, every professional up and down an organization should be using it. To set it up, take the following steps:

1. Go to the Google news home page.
2. Click the icon in the left-hand column that says “News alerts.”
3. Enter the search terms that you want to track. I recommend tracking your company name and your personal name at the very minimum.
4. In the “type” field, select “comprehensive” - this will track the Web, news, blogs, groups and all the information that Google has indexed.
5. How often depends on your needs. I recommend once-per-day, but if you are really a stickler for finding out information more quickly, you could select “as it happens.” The only warning about that setting is that you’ll be getting multiple notifications per day and it could quickly overwhelm your inbox depending on how many alerts you set up.
6. Click “create alert.”
7. In the past I needed to confirm my alerts - I no longer need to do that, but I’m not sure if that is because I am using a Gmail account, because I have set up so many news alerts in the past, or because Google has done away with the confirmation step. So just be aware that you may have to confirm your subscriptions (or you may not).

That’s it! You’ll now start getting notifications to your inbox. You can remove subscriptions by following the links that are in each email, and Google has created a page to manage alerts that will let you see all your notifications in one place and add and remove them easily.

That covers the how, but a quick word on the why you should do this. The primary reason to set up alerts is obvious - if you are the owner or an executive of a company or work in the PR department, it is your responsibility to monitor your brands. This is the easiest, least-intensive way to make sure that you are up-to-date on what people are saying about your company. But there are some other benefits that you might not realize:

- You will know what is going on with your company. If you’re an executive, you are likely privy to information before the rest of the employees, so this might not apply to you as much as to the non-executive who isn’t kept up-to-speed. It’s possible that by monitoring your company’s alerts, you’ll find out about acquisitions, financials, layoffs and even scandals before the rest of your colleagues. This happened famously at New York Times Digital where employees found out about layoffs before they were announced because of an article that was published in the New York Times.

- You will make sure that a bad image of you isn’t being leaked to the public. By keeping tabs on your personal brand (ie, your name) you will make sure that you know what people are saying about you and how you are being portrayed on the Web. Think that your MySpace page won’t show up in a Google search? Think again. By monitoring my alerts with my maiden name (Melissa Reyen), I found out that I am among the record holders for Harvard softball for most times grounded into a double play. Slightly embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as this.

- You will look smart. If you set up alerts to monitor not only your company, but also your competitors and the product or service that your company produces, you will be able to stay on the cutting-edge of the news for your industry. When you find out a particularly juicy tidbit, you can email your colleagues, who will think that you are super-smart and insightful for knowing this information, even though it was sent directly to you from Google.

- You can be proactive. If you find out that some unfortunate information is being spread about your company, you can work to to avert the problem and end up looking like a hero. When I worked at Ziff Davis, we were often accused of spamming people - anyone who works at a publishing company knows that this is a fairly regular occurrence, not because we were spamming, but because there are humans involved in the unsubscribe process and things occasionally go wrong. This happened, and my colleague Mary Hart was on the case quickly to respond to a blogger who was ranting. Her actions immediately turned the rant into praise for the exemplary customer service that she provided.

Bottom line: If you don’t have Google Alerts set up, do it today. The small amount of effort will be well worth it.

I made it to the TechCrunch Meetup in Boston on Friday night, and it was a lot of fun. I appreciate the hospitality from the folks at TechCrunch (there was open bar for the duration of the event) as well as the sponsors. I managed to talk about half of the vendors who were there, as well as a lot of random folks who, like me, just wanted to network and see what was going on with start-ups in Boston. Personally, I got a lot more from the people who I talked to than from the exhibitors (and I think that they had better products and projects in the works). But here’s my take on the exhibitors that I chatted with:

Mzinga - B2B social networking, is how they explained it to me. What I don’t get about this service is that they launched at the event, but they already have 2.7 million registered users, according to TechCrunch. That’s a pretty solid user base for a newly launching product. Where did those users come from?

CoreBlox - The president & CEO did a very brief demo but had a hard time because his co-worker nearly spilled water on his laptop before someone else tripped on the wire and unplugged it, but my takeaway is that they are offering a free customer support tool that can be used by businesses. I didn’t get a good sense of the quality of the tool.

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment - The people at this “booth” (I am not sure that it could be called a booth - cocktail table is more like it) were really knowledgeable and kind, especially since I don’t know much about online gaming, specifically MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role playing games). The thing that really shocked me, though, was that this company is two years, $40 million dollars in, and has 100 employees and a solid management team (from the looks of its Web site), but it doesn’t yet have a live game. My conversation with them went like this:

Me: What’s your biggest game?

Them: Stargate Worlds.

Me: How many people are playing it?

Them: Oh, it’s not live yet.

Wow. $40 million in, they must be sweating it a bit.

NowHound.com - Live Webcast search is all I got from the demo before Erick Schonfeld (from TechCrunch) came over and the folks there spun around in a neat little circle to talk to him.  

A personal note, my favorite part of the event was that I managed to drag along my good friend Denise Dubie. Denise and I worked together years back, but I haven’t attended a work event with her in years. It was so fun for me to see what a celebrity she has become in the IT world (she is a senior editor at Network World). For example, we walked by the Perkett PR booth and a couple of her story headlines were flashing on their screen, and at one point, I noticed some other people ducking and whispering about her before they came over to introduce themselves and shake her hand.

One of the guys in that group was Ross Levanto from Schwartz Communications, who was chatting with us for awhile. Our conversation was interrupted by some announcements by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Schonfeld. One of the things that they did during that set of announcements was draw a winner to play in an online game by Moola for a chance to win $5,000. Ross’ name was picked. He went, played and ended up winning the cash. He celebrates in the picture below (sorry for the bad photo, I was using my iPhone in a dark and crowded room):

I am a raving fan, and CustomInk.com is the object of my affection. I recently used their services to make t-shirts for a charity walk that I organized. Going into it, I had a few issues to overcome with the t-shirts:

1)      I had a deadline of less than 2 weeks to get the t-shirts printed and delivered

2)      I am not a designer and had to design the t-shirts

3)      I was trying to create something that would appeal to men, women and children

4)      I wanted to be able to get input from someone else on my team to help me make the final decision, but we don’t live in the same city

I did a search on Google for “t-shirt design” and customink.com was the first listing. (Another testimony to the power and importance of SEO, but I’ll save that discussion for another blog post.)

So there are a lot of reasons that I love this company. The first thing I discovered is that they are able to rush-deliver an order in less than 7 days. Perfect! Second, their online tool is really user-friendly and fun to use. You pick the item to design (they have shirts, pants, hats, etc.) and the color. Then you head to the “design online lab.” The tool starts you off with a blank t-shirt and then lets you add text, graphics (you can upload your own or choose from their clip art library), change colors, layouts, put effects on the text…there are wide range of options. Then, to top it all off, you can save the design, email it to people to get their opinions and then start again with a new design if you aren’t totally satisfied. This tool managed to help me overcome all four of the issues that I was having with designing these t-shirts. That was enough to make me love the service.

But there was more. I placed my order, got my final proofs, talked to someone at the company to answer a few questions that they had about tricky parts of the design. Great. Everyone was pleasant, I felt a high degree of confidence that my t-shirts would be done on-time and that they would look great. Then came the kicker. I got the following email:

Hi Melissa,I noticed that you have designed shirts that could possibly be for a charity event. If that’s the case, CustomInk would love to donate to your team or to the charity itself on your behalf! Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you  would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page.Warmest Regards,
Lori Mayfield
CustomInk.com

I immediately sent them a note back with the instructions about how to donate with a comment like “wow, I really love you” or something hero-worshipping like that. To which, Lori, my personal, human contact, sends me this delightful note back:

Thank you for the information, the link worked perfectly!

We try to donate to every charity event that our customers hold close to their hearts, so we are delighted to help with this event. Of course, we wish we could offer a large sponsorship, but because we do so many, I’m limited to small donations ($30). I just want to make sure you know that, even though we know every bit counts.

This is outstanding customer service and a fantastic policy for retention. Plus, it’s just really smart. I spent more than $500 with this company. The likelihood of me doing so again is high. I ordered 33 t-shirts – this means that I will tell all 33 of the people who are getting the t-shirts the story about this company (and I did!) because the company donated to our common cause. And finally, they know that they are reaching someone who has influence – the person who is in charge of the t-shirt ordering is likely someone who is making decisions for a large group of people and probably has other areas of responsibility and influence. This is really smart business. This article from Dosh Dosh talks about 9 great ways to dominate your niche, such as focusing on your reputation and developing retention equity, and CustomInk.com is doing all of these things.

See? I have become a raving fan.

~Today’s view:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/13799608@N08/1471632095/