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So You're On LinkedIn and Facebook. Now What Do You Do?

by Kim Brandt, Director of Marketing and Member Acquisition - February 8, 2010

So you’re on LinkedIn and Facebook. Now what do you do?

by Kim Brandt
Director of Marketing & Member Acquisition
American Teleservices Association
kim@ataconnect.org

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter -- it's all we hear about these days. I just read an article that says 57% of people online are already engaged in some form of social networking, but who really knows what that number is. Though many began using these tools just to stay in touch with friends, avoid face to face conversations with family, or to launch a job search - there's actually a greater opportunity when it comes to your business.

Social media tools allow you to not only connect with your business network, but also to educate, inform and interact with your target audience like never before. Are Twitter and Facebook viable communication tools for your company? Well that depends on a variety of factors, but I can tell you that they have the potential to truly strengthen the relationship between your product or service and consumers. When it's used in the right way, you can create brand awareness, bring target audiences together, and learn more than you’d ever hoped about your buyers.

As for a membership-based organization such as the American Teleservices Association (ATA), we’re seeing the power of the “tweet” and the response to our LinkedIn groups expand every day. It’s new to us, but the Association stands to vastly broaden its reach to contact center professionals with these tools. Here are a few examples of how the ATA is already using Social Networking to create industry awareness and bring professional people together:

Making it easy to Stay Connected. Our members are involved in numerous social networking groups, so we’ve tried to make it easy. Links to various ATA social platforms can be found on the ATA web site home page (www.ataconnect.org). It’s a single destination people can visit to easily connect with all ATA social networking opportunities.

Short but Sweet. Social networking enables us to get in touch with a large amount of people in a short period of time. We’re announcing our speakers, agenda and events for Convention using Twitter. It’s also been a great way to congratulate our chapter volunteers for hosting some phenomenal local events. Our list of online followers is growing! Join us at (www.twitter.com/The_ATA).

Don't just tell them, show them. We’re not just telling our members to somehow gather in cyberspace. The ATA has launched its own social networking platform (Contact Center Performance Forum), and the content is flowing daily there (www.contactcenter.ning.org). This is the place for contact center professionals to talk about business problems and share their solutions. And it’s a place for the Association board, staff and chapter leaders to monitor the topics that seem most relevant to industry peers in a very real way.

Location, Location, Location. We are blabbing about our events in locations all over the social media realm. We’re tweeting, posting to LinkedIn groups, blogging, discussing, and so on. The idea is to capture new audiences and drive traffic back to our web site. It’s working.

Maybe some of our examples will inspire you. How else could you be using these same tools to connect with your target audience? It’s more than friends and family these days – it’s how smart companies are branding their company. The possibilities to reach people through social networking are endless.

If you want to learn more about social media from a very practical point of view, the ATA Convention will be the perfect place (October 4-7 in New Orleans). Author of “The Social Media Bible” Lon Safko will speak about doing business using social media tools. The “social media guy” himself, Yianni Garcia will be back with the ATA after presenting to a thrilled audience at a recent chapter event in New York about how to integrate these tools into call center customer service environments. Attorney Chad Richter of Jackson Lewis will highlight some of the legal concerns about use of social networking by your employees. There will be enough stats, analytics, case studies, ROI and such to make you think twice about your own social strategy. Don’t miss out! Register now at www.ata2009convention.org.

 
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