Kendrick particularly likes to help startups get noticed.

“When you’re a small company starting out and you don’t have a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy your way into a market, you need to go guerrilla,” he recommends — to stage “little wars” that surprise the competition.

Kendrick self-publishes books, gets on the speaker circuit and uses every relationship he has. Admittedly, that “sometimes wears out a few welcomes in the process.” And many entrepreneurs lack those talents or chutzpah.

But here are some of Kendrick’s marketing tactics that he urges others to try:

—Strew business cards “like confetti.”

—Use bumper stickers. “It’s so last decade, but it still works.”

—Hand out branded balloons. (My aside: Environmentalists would prefer you didn’t.)

—Print lapel buttons.

—Use banners and post in prominent locations.

—Slip brochures under windshield wipers and doors.

—Give away branded pens and whatnot.

—Pay someone to wear a sandwich sign in a high-traffic location.

—Hit the “like” button on others’ Facebook pages and hope they “like” you in return. You do have a Facebook page, right?

—Tweet. A lot.

—Tie in with a well-known brand and do a co-promotion.

—Talk to people. Business relationships have been made because of chats with fellow airline passengers and, yes, on the golf course.

“You need something creative to differentiate yourself from other people,” Kendrick advises.

But in the end, “it all goes down to being yourself. That appeals to people. You can’t sell yourself if it’s not something you want to do.”

And he really does like red gym shoes.

Source: Chicago Tribune

General Motors is dropping its advertising on Facebook just as the social-media giant’s public stock offering is poised to become one of the largest in IPO history.

GM spokesman Greg Martin confirmed that after reassessing its media spending it has decided to stop advertising on the popular social-media site.

GM spends about $40 million a year on Facebook marketing, the Wall Street Journal said, about $10 million of which is for paid advertisements.

GM spokesman Pat Morrissey stressed that the automaker will continue to promote its cars and trucks on its own Facebook pages, but is evaluating its ad spending.

“We are committed to a content strategy,” Morrissey said.

News of the automaker’s review came on the same day that an Associated Press-CNBC poll revealed that ads on Facebook are not very effective.

In the poll, 83% of respondents said they “hardly ever” or “never” click on the ads Facebook serves up.

The ones who did click through were enough to yield the company$4.34 per user in advertising last year. That’s up from $3.07 in 2009.

GM’s view of Facebook differs from crosstown rival Ford, which said it will continue to advertise on the site.

Ford has made extensive use of Facebook and other social-media sites, becoming the first automaker to reveal a model on the social-media network in July 2010.

Normally, automakers reveal models at major auto shows but Ford unveiled the redesigned Explorer on Facebook first as well as at a series of live events in cities across the country.

“Our approach is different than others,” when it comes to Facebook, said Matt VanDyke, director of marketing communications for Ford. “We worked with Facebook in advance on how to buy some paid and sponsored advertising to really amplify and leverage the things we were already doing.”

VanDyke said Ford’s social/digital advertising budget is about a third of Ford’s overall advertising budget.

“For us it’s all about the execution. It’s not just a paid advertising strategy, or go create wacky content and see if it goes viral.” VanDyke said.

VanDyke said he views Facebook differently than traditional media.

“Social networking is the No. 1 activity and Facebook is the No. 1 site for networking in the U.S.,” VanDyke said.

Facebook is scheduled to begin trading on Nasdaq on Friday.

The world’s largest online social network on Tuesday increased the planned price range for its stock to $34 to $38 per share in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s up from its previous range of $28 to $35. At the upper limit of $38, the sale would raise about $12.8 billion.

Source: Detroit Press

The U.S. Postal Service is offering the 2012 Mobile Commerce and Personalization Promotion to encourage commercial mailers to use mobile marketing tools — such as QR codes — on their mail.

“Mobile technologies continue to be one of the fastest-growing marketing sectors,” said Gary Reblin, vice president, Domestic Products. ”During the holidays, mobile purchases were up from 5.5 percent of ecommerce sales in 2010 to 11 percent in 2011.

“The integration of direct mail with mobile technologies will not only improve the long-term value of direct mail but also increase returns for merchants,” added Reblin.

According to MarketingProfs, 2012, 48 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers own a smartphone, and one in five U.S. smartphone owners scanned a QR code with their phones, as of Dec. 2011. The Direct Marketing Association estimates that marketing mail returns $12.75 for every $1 spent.

“Personalization has always been an effective attribute of direct mail, and studies show that it improves return on investment,” said Reblin. “Tying personalization with mobile technology is the next obvious step to enhancing the value of both mail and mobile marketing.”

Commercial mailers may register for the 2012 Mobile Commerce and Personalization Promotion now through Aug. 30, 2012. For more information, visit usps.com/mobile-barcode.

The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 151 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 35th in the 2011 Fortune 500. In 2011, the U.S. Postal Service was ranked number one in overall service performance, out of the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world, Oxford Strategic Consulting. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.

Source: US Postal Service

Long predicted as another Next Big Thing, the use of social-media tools within a company will, supporters say, unlock corporate knowledge, enhance internal communication and drive bottom-line growth.

A report published Tuesday by researchers Millward Brown, and sponsored by Google, goes some way to supporting that claim.

The report found 81% of high-growth companies — those with more than 10% growth in 2011 — already using social-media tools said the tools have had a “significant” impact on growth and expansion. The data were based on a survey of 2,700 people in seven European countries.

“The better the performance of a company, the more likely they are to be using social-media tools,” said Allan Hyde, senior account director at Millward Brown.

Interestingly, it was senior executives, not young juniors, who were most likely to be using the tools. Nearly three-quarters of those using social-media tools at least once a week for business (as opposed to personal) purposes were from senior roles, compared with 49% of those in more junior roles.

And social media also looks like a good way to get promoted. The report says that 86% of frequent users have recently been promoted.

Not suggesting that this is some sort of panacea…

However, the survey was designed to measure sentiment about the use of social-media tools, rather than efficacy, and while it is strong on what executives think about it, it is rather less strong on demonstrating the bottom line impact.

The report shows, for example, that of the countries surveyed, those with the most enthusiastic users of social tools were Spain and Italy, while the least enthusiastic users were in Germany. According to the latest Eurostat figures, gross domestic product in Germany in grew 0.5% in the first quarter, while in Spain it fell 0.3% and  Italy contracted by 0.8%.

While the report showed a correlation between corporate success and the use of social media, Mr. Hyde wasn’t suggesting a causative link.

“It may well be that the sort of companies that adopt social media tools are the sort of companies that are successful anyway. We are not suggesting that this is some sort of panacea,” he said.

Source: WSJ

The online survey, designed by Millward Brown Corporate (London), was completed by 2,700 executives between Feb. 24 and March 14 from respondents in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. All 2,700 respondents were working full-time in non-manual, office-based roles.

The survey was only completed by employees who were able to access and use social media for work-related purposes in their workplace (either via personal accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. or internal social-media applications run by their employer).

When it comes to SEO, many business owners are overwhelmed. There’s so much information out there, much of it conflicting, making it nearly impossible to drill down to the right strategies you should be employing. In this post I’ll try to walk through several of the considerations you should be taking into account in determining which SEO tactics to prioritize for your business.

Different people often describe different SEO tactics in different ways, but at a high level we can think about SEO in two basic categories:

On-site SEO: This is basically anything that you’d do to your own site to generate more relevant search engine traffic. This includes specific on-page elements such as title tags, image ALT tags, meta descriptions, internal linking strategies, as well as technical SEO (i.e. duplicate content issues, etc.). On-site SEO is important for any Website, but may be more or less valuable depending on the type of site you have – for instance this should often be the primary focus for larger websites that have a lot of robust content, broad distribution “built in,” and already have a lot of authority and trust with search engines (such as news sites).

Off-site SEO: This is essentially a variety of things that would be classified as “link building” such as guest blogging, link outreach and producing share-worthy content. If your site has a relatively small amount of content and is targeting a smaller basket of keywords that are highly relevant to your business, after you get the basics in place with regards to on-page SEO your focus will likely be on building links to help rank for your core terms.

Choosing the right SEO strategies – those that make the most sense for your business — is the first step to a successful campaign. This is followed by the decision between managing these tasks in-house and outsourcing to an SEO agency. Here’s a breakdown of the main strategies falling under each category and how to determine what tactics will make the most senseyou’re your business.

On-Site SEO

On-site content: The content appearing on your Website is the foundation on which you can build the rest of your SEO strategy. Without a solid base of content, traffic-building efforts will produce lackluster results. If your business involves highly technical information, and you have someone on staff with both the bandwidth and the skills to produce quality content, it makes more sense to retain content production in-house.

On the other hand, if your content needs exceed the capabilities of your staff, options include outsourcing to a content provider or hiring a dedicated staff writer. It’s also possible to maintain production in-house and outsource to an editor to refine content before publishing.

Blogs: Blogs alone can require a significant time commitment. But the nice thing about blogs is that having multiple voices is encouraged. In this case, multiple staff members can often contribute content, at least initially. But as your audience grows you may find that you need more frequent updates, so you may choose to outsource to an agency. Like on-site content, if the blog content is highly specialized, it’s probably better to keep it in-house.

Keywords, site structure, & technical SEO: Formatting the navigation and code of a website is one of the most technical aspects of SEO. This is one task not easily managed in-house, unless you’re already employing an SEO specialist or developer knowledgeable in SEO best practices. That said, for many smaller content sites a periodic SEO audit can be effective in keeping your site up to date with best practices without having to retain an SEO on an on-going basis.

Off-site SEO

Overall link building strategy: There are a variety of methods that can be used to drive traffic and links. One of the most effective that is also highly useful for branding and thought leadership is content marketing. You’ll want to spend some time thinking about the different types of content creation and promotion that will be the most efficient and effective for your business, and consider how best to use your resources to execute a content marketing strategy. This could be as simple as periodically publishing well-thought out articles and infographics, or it could be as complex as publishing multiple posts a day and adhering to a strict editorial calendar.

Guest blogging: Guest blogging is a widely-used strategy for both networking and linkbuilding. The process involves outreach, pitching and producing content appropriate for placement on related websites.  Guest blogs are often used as a way to establish thought leadership and brand awareness, so informative posts coming from a CEO or other high-level executive have a bigger impact. Still, it’s possible to have posts ghostwritten if you don’t have the capabilities to produce it in-house.

Content creation and linkbait: This category includes case studies, white papers, list posts, edgy blog posts, infographics, webinars, and all the content pieces that can be used to grab attention and encourage social sharing. Infographics should almost always be outsourced unless you employ a skilled graphic designer, while the other tasks can be managed either in-house or via outsourcing depending on the skill level required and the technical level of the content.

Before you determine whether your focus will be on on-page SEO or more on content creation think about some of the following questions:

Do you have a large site that targets a number of different keywords on a variety of different pages? If so your focus should likely be on technical SEO issues and internal linking and information architecture.

Do you have a smaller site focusing on a shorter list of keywords? If so you’ll want to find a way to build links into specific pages, likely spending more of your efforts – particularly your ongoing efforts – on content marketing and link building.

What types of content resources do you have available (who has the ability and bandwidth to write a blog post, an in-depth article, etc.)?

What types of outreach resources would you have available (in the event that you need to identify a list of sites to promote a contest/piece of content/etc. to who could carry out contacting those sites, if anyone)?

Do you have any graphic resources available internally?

Do you have any programming resources available internally (someone who could potentially build a simple widget designed to attract links or make updates to the site that would benefit SEO)?

Obviously in areas that are logical for you to focus on where you have adequate resources you can get those internal resources to work for you. If you’re lacking in the areas that you’ll want to dedicate the most attention to, however, (if your focus should be on technical SEO but you lack technical resources, for instance) those would be areas where you’d want to consider outsourcing.

Even if most small businesses don’t understand search engine optimization (SEO), that doesn’t mean they can’t be helped by it.  For those who don’t know SEO from their CEO, it is in essence a means of improving the ranking of your business in the Google search algorithm. This in turn, can help a business move up in Google’s search listing.

Sonam Lama, CEO of Achieve Visibility, a SEO site specializing in helping small- and medium-size businesses, says there are a few quick fixes that small businesses can take to help improve their Google rankings. The best part is they are free and simple.

Use WordPress

“WordPress is the most SEO-friendly blogging platform,” Lama said.  “It is also one of, if not the best, content management systems when it comes to SEO. Optimizing your site using WordPress, instead of the outdated website platforms which most local businesses use will help your optimization efforts.”

Keyword Research

“This is the foundation of SEO and increasing your ranking on Google and the major search engines,” Lama said. “Once you created or switched over your site to WordPress, you want to do some keyword research. Look for at least three relevant keywords you want to target.”

Onsite Optimization

“Once you’ve identified those highly searched keywords, sprinkle them onto your site and spread them around in various places,” Lama said. “You don’t want to stuff them everywhere, though, since this will be considered ‘spamming’ by Google.”

Google Places

“After you have your website properly and effectively optimized for the search engines, you want to claim your Google Places business listing,” Lama said. “You do this adding basic information about your business and being as detailed as possible in each section. For example, give your complete phone number, address, business description, keywords, hours of operation, etc.  You can further improve rankings by adding photos and asking for reviews of your business.”

Back linking

“Finally, once you’ve optimized your Google places listing, you should be ranking within a few days to a week,” Lama said. “Those rankings occur within the local listings (the top portion of Google where you see the red tabs: A, B, C, D, etc.).”

The job, however, doesn’t end there.  According to Lama, businesses can also boost their ranking in the natural Google search results by back linking.

“My top methods of back linking for local business keywords range from social bookmarking to profile submissions on high page rank sites among several others,” Lama said. “Each of these methods will allow you to create a valuable link back to your site, which will increase its value and relevancy in the eyes Google.”

India may be embracing latest technologies like mobility and cloud, but factors like privacy concerns and cultural fabric could restrain social media growth in the country as compared to other nations, a report by research firm Gartner today said.

The report suggests that four significant  forces that will shape businesses during the next five years are IT, mobile, cloud and social media.

These pivotal technologies include the explosive use of media tablets, mobile applications, context-aware computing, Internet, analytics and in-memory computing (IMC), it added.

“India is poised to become one of the world’s biggest consumer economies in the coming five years. By 2014, it is expected to have more than one billion mobile subscribers and will also see significant roll-out of new IT infrastructure in both public and private sectors,” Gartner Research VP Rakesh Kumar said.

The youthful, increasingly well-educated and technically sophisticated population will drive the adoption of new technologies in the country, he said.

However, the use of social media during the next five years may be at lower levels in India compared with other countries.

“Although it’s easy to see how social media could grow rapidly during the next few years, privacy concerns and the cultural fabric of the country may suggest otherwise,” Kumar said.

India with over 25 million users is one of the major markets for social networking site Facebook. Apart from Google’s Orkut and professional networking site LinkedIn, there are smaller networking sites operating too.

Companies, especially in sectors like FMCG, consumer durables, auto and telecom are leveraging social media to connect with consumers to get feedback.

“This will lead to a further engagement of brands with customers and helps the economy as well,” he said.

Besides, India has gained a substantial position for application development, maintenance, support and innovation globally and the same now needs to be used domestically.

“A sense of entrepreneurship is embedded into the Indian psyche which is beginning to lead to startups exploring areas such as pattern mapping. What will now be important is that the same is deployed in the domestic market as well,” he added.

Facebook has started testing a system that lets users pay to highlight or promote posts

By paying a small fee users can ensure that information they post on the social network is more visible to friends, family and colleagues.

The tests are being carried out among the social network’s users in New Zealand.

Facebook said the goal was to see if users were interested in paying to flag up their information.

Money maker

The tests of the “pay to promote” system were discovered by a Facebook user in Whangarei, reported New Zealand’s news magazine Stuff.

At first, said Stuff, the user thought the offer to pay to promote a post was a con trick.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to the BBC the offer was genuine.

“We’re constantly testing new features across the site,” said the spokesperson. “This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.”

Different methods of highlighting posts were being tested, said the spokesperson. These would see a range of charges being levied to make posts more visible. Comments on the tests suggest the highest price being charged was £1.25 ($2) while others cost 25p or 50p.

Payments could be made via credit card or PayPal.

The spokesperson said some of the methods it was trying out would incur a charge but others would highlight a post for free. The spokesperson would not be drawn on when the test would end or if it would be tried in other territories.

“We’re going to see a lot more ideas like this where they are testing out different ways to try to make money,” said Ian Maude, internet analyst at Enders Analysis.

Both Facebook’s imminent stock market flotation and a recent slowdown in revenue growth were helping to concentrate its attention on ways to make money, he said.

“In the last few years their overall revenue has grown much more quickly than their audience,” he said. However, he said, that rapid growth had slowed in the last six months and had perhaps prompted it to experiment.

The flotation will add more pressure, said Mr Maude but he added that the way the stock would be split could lighten that burden a little as Mark Zuckerberg would be left 57% of the shares.

“He’s always said he wants to make money to run the company not run the company to make money,” said Mr Maude

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is heading in a new direction as it drills deeper into Facebook’s social network and Twitter’s messaging service to showcase information unlikely to be found on Google.

The changes, unveiled Thursday, will reshape how Bing displays its search results. It represents Microsoft’s most dramatic shift in Internet search since the software maker introduced Bing as a “decision engine” nearly three years ago.

Microsoft Corp. is counting on the new format to loosen Google’s stranglehold on the lucrative Internet search market. In the process, Microsoft hopes to turn a profit in its online division, which has lost more than $6.3 billion since Bing’s June 2009 debut.

Bing replaced “Live Search,” a mostly futile attempt to challenge Google. Microsoft touted Bing as a Google alternative that would provide more meaningful results by helping people make important decisions, such as picking a doctor and finding the best time to buy an airline ticket.

For the past two years, Bing has been taking advantage of Microsoft’s close relationship with Facebook to tap into the personal data on the world’s largest network. But it hasn’t come up with an approach compelling enough to lure away most Web surfers from Google.

Although Bing has been far more successful than Live Search, virtually all of its gains have come at the expense of Yahoo Inc., which began relying on Microsoft’s search technology in 2010 as part of a 10-year partnership between the companies.

The latest effort to challenge Google will start next month. Microsoft plans a marketing blitz on television and the Internet to promote the changes. Anyone seeking a peek during the next few weeks of testing can go to http://www.bing.com/new beginning Tuesday.

The revised system presents Bing’s results in three columns, or panes.

The left column will feature the familiar blue links drawn from Bing’s computer formula for finding the most relevant results.

The middle section, called “Snapshot,” is reserved for completing tasks, such as getting directions, making a hotel reservation or buying movie tickets. This feature isn’t expected to be available during the testing phase.

Once available, Snapshot will provide a space featuring movie show times and an option to buy tickets in response to a search for “The Avengers.” Searches for hotels will bring up pictures of rooms and information on amenities, as well as the ability to make reservations.

The “Sidebar” column on the far right side will be the centerpiece of the new Bing.

Sidebar is where Bing users logged into Facebook will see recommendations culled from their Facebook network. From there, people will be able to post on friends’ Facebook pages without leaving the results page. The results from a Bing search can even be shared on friends’ Facebook pages with a question about the topic.

For instance, a search for “Kauai hotels” might list your Facebook friends who have been to the island. You can then use the Sidebar box to posting a note on a friend’s page seeking advice.

The Sidebar column also will highlight relevant tweets, including those from people you might not follow. The feature will also suggest experts on topics related to certain search requests and list their Twitter handles, along with any blogs or other websites where they share their insights.

Most of the personal data that Bing is pulling from Facebook and Twitter is unavailable to Google because its search engine doesn’t have the same access to those information-sharing hubs as Microsoft does.

“This is a big, bold bet that we think is going to surprise a lot of people,” said Lisa Gurry, Bing’s senior director. “It’s a fundamentally different way of looking at search.”

It’s also an admission by Bing that its previous attempts to incorporate Facebook data into its search results haven’t worked out.

For the past year, Bing has been customizing search results based on the recommendations expressed by the number of times a user’s Facebook network had pressed a “like” button on topics related to a search request. Gurry said Bing discovered that most Web surfers don’t want the results influenced by their friends to be co-mingled with answers generated by a computer program.

That culminated in the decision create Sidebar so a separate area of the results page is devoted to the social networking suggestions.

Bing’s experience underscores the difficulty that all search engines have had figuring out how to blend the influence of social networking into their results, said Altimeter Group analyst Rebecca Lieb.

“Different parts of the social graph are good for different reasons,” she said. “When I am looking for advice about a movie, I probably don’t want to see a recommendation from one of my `foodie’ friends. What Bing is doing looks like a very elegant approach, but it remains to be seen if people are going to like it.”

Lieb doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence that Bing is announcing its Facebook-friendly makeover as the world’s largest social network prepares to complete the biggest initial public offering of stock. The media frenzy surrounding Facebook’s IPO, expected next week, can only make more people more curious to see how Bing is highlighting results from the social network, Lieb said.

Microsoft has been working closely with Facebook since it bought a 1.6 percent stake in the social network for $240 million in 2007. It has proven to be a tremendous investment. Microsoft’s Facebook stake is now worth $900 million to $1.2 billion, depending on the price set in the IPO. And now Bing can pore through the reams of information being posted by Facebook’s more than 900 million users, 18 times more the social network had when Microsoft bought its stake.

Twitter also has been selling Microsoft expanded access to its tweets since 2009. Google Inc. lost its special privileges to the same stream of data last summer because Twitter didn’t renew a licensing agreement.

That partnership unraveled right around the same time Google launched its Plus social network to counter the growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter. In a move that has amplified questions about its objectivity, Google began this year to favor results drawn from Plus while excluding publicly available information from Facebook and Twitter.

The bias has provided more fodder for an intensifying Federal Trade Commission investigation into allegations that Google has been stifling competition by highlighting its own services and burying or completely ignoring links to its rivals’ websites.

Despite Microsoft’s massive investments in search, Bing hasn’t been able to ding Google so far. Microsoft has nearly doubled the 8 percent share of the U.S. search market that it held when it rolled out Bing, but virtually all of those gains have come at the expense of Yahoo Inc.

Google ended March with a 66 percent share of the U.S. search market, up by a percentage point from June 2009 when Bing entered the fray, according to the research firm comScore Inc. Bing’s share currently a distant second at 15 percent.

Unlike its rival, Bing intends to include relevant recommendations from a wide range of social networking services, including Google Plus.

“We are not trying to build an empire by favoring some services over others,” Gurry said.

Source: Business Week

“There is a tremendous echo in social-media channels,” said Thomas Sclafani, a spokesman for American Express, which found in a recent survey that consumers who use social media to get a company’s attention wield a much bigger stick than those who don’t.

That’s because, beyond the broader audience who might see a complaint on, say, Facebook or Twitter, people who use social media to voice their discontent are much likelier to also talk to people directly about the problem, compared with someone who simply calls the customer-service center.

Social media-ites, according to the American Express survey, will directly tell 53 people about bad customer-service experiences, who will tell their friends who will tell their friends and so on.

Those who don’t use social media tell only 17 people they’re unhappy with a service, compared with the 24 people that the general population tells.

The same is true for good experiences, by the way. Social-media users tell 42 people they were thrilled with some service versus the nine people told by those who don’t use social media and the 15 people with whom the general population confides.

Overwhelmingly, consumers still take the traditional face-to-face and phone route to speak to real, live people to make complaints, according to American Express’s annual Global Customer Service Barometer. But they’re getting better results when they amplify that complaint on a widely used social-media site like Facebook or Twitter.

Success stories

Call it the power of the people online. It manifested late last year when Molly Katchpole, the then-22-year-old part-time nanny took on the mighty Bank of America’s efforts to tag $5 debit-card fees on customers.

She did it again when Verizon attempted to levy a $2 online-payment fee. More than 130,000 signatures made it to that petition in 24 hours, and the company backed down.

There have been other outrages publicized via social media. Take the Canadian songwriter who came up against United Airlines when it wouldn’t cover his $3,500 guitar that was broken by baggage handlers. His humorous protest “United Breaks Guitars” went viral on YouTube and prompted United to give him a one-time licensing fee to use his video in its customer-service training.

Social networks are the quintessential platform for self-expression. They lure you to share tidbits, both big and small, about yourself, your life and your experiences. People read those and react to them.

The beauty of it, experts noted, is that you don’t have to be rich or famous to get heard and to sway public opinion.

“Influence has been democratized,” said Mark Schaefer, a social-media marketing consultant.

“Anyone can have an audience now and their sentiments are amplified,” said Schaefer, who is the author of “The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Your Business 140 Characters at a Time.”

He pointed to a recent experience of his own. He checked himself in on Foursquare, the location mobile-phone application, when he and his wife entered a Knoxville, Tenn., restaurant. A message from a trusted friend popped up, bashing the restaurant’s service from two weeks earlier.

“He is an influencer to me,” Schaefer said. “If I had seen that review before we left, I might not even have stepped in the door and the whole time I was there I was anticipating bad service.”

His wife, who hadn’t seen or heard about the message, was undaunted and thought, despite Schaefer’s constant queries about it, that the service was fine. “I interpreted it as bad service and she thought they were just busy,” he said.

Magnify that to all those who did see the review and the modern-day complaint department is an online bullhorn for consumers to alert the masses about poor customer service. (But let’s not forget to alert those people about good service, too.)

Skip the call center?

What’s more, the online complaint department at most companies has a lot more authority than the call-center staff. Dave Carroll, the Nova Scotia songwriter with the broken guitar, said he spent nine months hassling with United Airlines’s customer-service representatives through email and on the phone—to no avail. When his YouTube video went viral, the airline took action.

“Social-media watchers are given more power to resolve the problem and quiet them down,” said Larry Freed, chief executive of ForeSee, a customer analytics firm. “Whether they do it privately or through social media, they tell their friends that they had this problem, they tweeted it and the company resolved it. What do you think the next guy’s going to do?”

There are those who argue that social-media outrage is just another means of squeezing out the silent majority. That could be true, but it’s more akin to the crowd mentality in which outrage begets outrage—it feeds upon itself.

“We’ve gotten into a little bit of a bad rut where people realize that if I want action, I’m going to tweet this,” he said. “I don’t think that’s good for anyone when it comes down to it.”

Until companies can turn the corner on what American Express’s Sclafani calls the “sorry state of customer service,” consumers now know the world wide web is listening.

How to get a company’s attention

Here are the best ways to complain:

Tell your friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ or LinkedIn. Be sure that you tag it. On Facebook you can type an @ sign before the company name and then click the drop-down menu so the name gets highlighted.

If you’re creative, try posting a catchy tune on YouTube like Dave Carroll, the songwriter from Nova Scotia did.

Tell people you don’t know on popular review sites like Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare or Open Table and, again, be sure to tag it.

Look to complaint sites like Gripevine.com, Wacktrap.com or Ripoffreport.com.

Find out where the company is most active, such as on Twitter or Facebook, and target that.

If you choose Twitter, be sure to tag it by including the @ sign and the company’s Twitter handle or a hash-tag with the company’s name.

It’s likely the company has someone monitoring its Facebook page and at the ready to respond. But just in case, tag it.

Be direct and polite.

Don’t ever be inappropriate. That can get your complaint pulled, and likely ignored.

Source: Market Watch