Category: Office Hours

Hosted from San Fransisco
Guest Hosts: Jonathan Hochman, and Deborah Schultz

Top 3 things companies can do to get started saying “hi” through social media:
1. Listening to customers and spending time finding out with what interests them.
2. Speaking with a human voice.
3. Reaching out more proactively to your customers: concrete way to do this is just go out and thank current customers you have: reward loyalty.

Obstacles in companies engaging with customers: current practices and business structure. Helps to show examples, get a champion in this.. most underutilized resource in copmanies is their own employees.

Zappos does a great job at this, puts customers first. Nike also did a great campaign about soccer overseas- went out and asked fans interested to video tape themselves kicking a ball…. strung these thousands of videos together made it look like average Joe was kicking ball to soccer stars.

Companies need to have more continuous approach with dealing with their customers.

What’s the ideal load time per page on a site with 20 million pages?

As quick as possible!
150 milliseconds, If it’s slower, maybe you have a server issue, or hosting issue, but also take into consider bandwidth. Load time is part of the quality score within pay per click programs. Not the same with Organic searches, but you will have fewer views if it takes a long time to load, and it also goes back to crawl efficient, SE’s don’t have unlimited time to crawl a site. Canoncization also makes a big difference.

Last comments from Jonathan and Deb: advice for companies using social media?

Jonathan: You don’t have to use every social media out there. The last thing you want is to go in a million different directions. If your customers don’t use twitter, you don’t need to be on twitter.

Deb: Social media is social. If you start something, there needs to be a continuation. A date stamp is a social contract. It means “I’m coming back”. There is an opportunity to interact more humanly with your customers.

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