We spend a lot of time working with local businesses. And time after time we find a lot of enthusiasm for Facebook – most folks can quickly grasp the inherit value of being where a large portion of their customers spend an increasingly large part of their day . What we do find is that some folks struggle with the best ways to get started. So with that in mind we have this simple get started plan - all of which you can do with SocialGuides.

This is an example of one of our customers that is using our Welcome Tab.

Build a list – the best way to think about this is similar to email marketing.  You are building a list, a social list. There are many ways to create programs and campaigns to engage an active audience. We encourage that for certain. But we’ve actually discovered the easiest way to get started growing the list is to implement a Facebook Welcome Tab.  The welcome tab provides a simple call to action with a reason to ‘like’ your business (e.g. ‘Like’ us to get access to exclusive offers and access to the latest news). For many consumers, this simple message gives them a reason to ‘Like’ your business.

Many of you, have no doubt heard all about the LinkedIn IPO last week.  As the first major social network to go public,  it’s focus on utility proved that social could provide real value to folks engaging in business.  And while there are many things that make LinkedIn’s product offering strong, one of the main pillars has been their deep use of a connection’s degree of separation. Now you’ve probably played the 6 degrees to kevin bacon game (and if you haven’t we recommend you give it a go), but you may not have thought about how he applies to business. This article will talk a bit about how LinkedIn uses the Kevin Bacon concept for contacts, and how we at SocialGuides use it for word of mouth promotions.

So how does the LinkedIn network work?

Well people who you are friends, colleagues or other direct contacts are in your 1st degree network.  People to whom you are not directly connected to, but are connected with your contacts, are in your 2nd degree network.  People your 2nd degree contacts know are in your 3rd degree network. Like a fancy Rolodex that connects to your contact’s fancy Rolodex, you use the people in your 1st degree network to get introduced to people in your 2nd degree network, and see who they might know in your 3rd degree network.  Pretty simple right? And if you lookup your LinkedIn stats, you might find your network reach might look something like this:

In the example above it’s impressive to see LinkedIn’s estimates that 159 connections means I’m only an intro away from roughly one hundred thousand contacts.  That’s pretty cool.  And if we follow their thinking further, those one hundred thousand contacts could get close to 5 million people.  Now of course I can’t practically get to 5 million people, but it shows how quickly your social reach blows up by just a few a degrees of separation.

SocialGuides uses a similar concept of degrees of separation with your businesses fans on Facebook and Twitter.

You see, conventional word of mouth reaches only a small number of people. But on Facebook & Twitter  each of an estimated 600 million active users is connected to an average of 130 friends - translation: your fans can get you to a heck of a lot of people. In fact this is just like LinkedIn’s first degree, because after all, anything a fan shares on the Facebook & Twitter can be (and often is) broadcast automatically to all of those person’s friends. As an example, let’s look at typical local business using the SocialGuides Dashboard.

socialguides 1 degree of seperation network reach

In the case of Game On Ladera, 191 Fans on Facebook, connects them to 46,670 people. So basically, if a small business like this one could offer a compelling enough promotion, where each fan simply shared the offer with each of their friends on Facebook - this small business could get the word out to nearly fifty thousand people. Which interestingly means, a social campaign has a potential reach that’s the size of a medium sized newspaper circulation or a small radio campaign, wow!  And if you take it one step farther, three degrees away from this business is again a few million people, which is essentially Facebook’s user base for orange county. Basically this is what everyone talks about when they say something “went viral” on social. Because a small retail business like the one above could in theory get to everyone in their entire town within 3 degrees.

Now of course, just as you, for all practical purposes, wouldn’t ever get intro’d to a hundred thousand contacts on LinkedIn (let alone 5M), you probably aren’t going to see the corner business get everyone within there fans reach to share their cool promotion. But even so, knowing how word of mouth operates in the social era is a key step in realizing that as a small business, you’re not just taking care of 2oo fans on Facebook, you are working for the opportunity to meet their friends - and well, there’s a lot of friends out there!

Don’t you hate it when Internet companies are the WORST at customer support.  They hide their phone number, bury where they are located, and typically make you jump through millions of hoops, just to get a hold of them.  Well we hate the too.  Our goal at SocialGuides is to make social media easy and useful for businesses.  We certainly can’t do that well if a customer can’t get a hold of us. So we’ve decided to make it part of our mission to be as available as possible.  Starting now you can call us toll free at 1-877-337-5678 or LiveChat with us directly within the product.

I personally love the LiveChat concept. Anytime you have a question, idea, concern, or whatever while using SocialGuides you simply click the button on the right and someone will be there to talk you through things in a matter of seconds.  It’s so easy to do, and it’s really reassuring knowing help is right next to you.  Selfishly, of course, we love it too because by talking to our customers, it helps us make better products (well i guess that’s not completely selfish is it?). For now SocialGuides LiveChat is running 9am - 6pm pst (and you can leave a message if we aren’t online).  Hopefully someday we’ll be able to run it 24-7.  Right now though, its cool to know when you hit us up, you aren’t talking to some person in another country, you are talking to one of our engineers, product managers, or perhaps even one of the founders.

Of course you can also call us, because sometimes there’s no substitute for a good old fashion voice conversation. Did you hear that big silly internet companies? There’s no substitute for a good old fashion voice conversation.

Now, if you run an online company and jive with our mantra of trying to be always available for customers, you might be wondering how we run both services.  Well with LiveChat we use a product called Plupper, which offers both livechat and help desk type capabilities (support logging, faqs, etc).  We’ve used a bunch of the other ones and found that Plupper had the best balance of the features we needed and a great pricing structure.  Other online support tools we’ve heard good things about are: Banckle, GetSatisfaction, Olark, UserVoice, and Zopim.  For our phone support we use a great product called Grasshopper.  There are other good products that have virtual pbx features like RingCentral and Onebox but we haven’t used either system so you’ll have to check them out yourself.

Whichever products you choose, we can’t encourage you enough to look for as many ways as possible to be customer centric. Sometimes that will be with support products like Plupper & GetSatisfaction, sometimes that will be with social products like SocialGuides (shameless plug) & Assistly (a cool social help desk), and sometimes it will be with good old fashion voice or a handwritten note.  No matter what the method of choice is though (and we can’t say this enough) - we believe whether you are a growing bakery, a social software startup, or an established eCommerce company, helping people should be at the core of who you are and what you do.

We had a fun day with some unexpected media coverage from the good folks at ReadWriteWeb. While some of the information was a tad incorrect (funding) and it’s not quite the same as being the most interesting man in the world, we were excited to win the readers poll 5 Tech Companies That Raised Money Today: Which Interests You Most? We were next to some awesome companies so we were honored to get the nod.

For all of our new customers that have joined the SocialGuides family today, welcome.  We also want to thank ReadWriteWeb for giving us some love.

One of the challenges of running a small business is that while you might have drunk the kool-aide of social media marketing, you still don’t have time to be spending all day on Twitter & Facebook - you’ve got a business to run.  You certainly don’t want to miss out on outreach to customers though either.  So today we are releasing an update to our dashboard that completely integrates all of your Facebook & Twitter outreach into one ease use product.

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Quick… you’ve got 30 seconds to tell us what your company does. [ramble] [ramble] [ramble] social commerce [ramble] [ramble] [ramble] social media [ramble] new customers [ramble] loyalty [ramble]…

You know the drill. And trust us, we could talk about SocialGuides forever (it’s hard to help it, we love what we do), but frankly sometimes it’s just easier to see what we do. So there it is - SocialGuides in 4 slides (below).

Let us know what you think (it’s best viewed if you go under the menu tab and view in full screen).

Managing your customer relationships on Twitter can be a bit hard at times. Sometimes it’s finding the right new customer leads to reach out to - a coffee shop in santa cruz, probably has little interest in a tea drinker in London. Or other times it’s making sure your following existing customers - hey if someone has said something nice about your business, the least you could do is follow them back. Or other times it’s cutting your losses and letting go of people that aren’t interested in your business - hey you can’t win them all.

So we created this little tool. It’s beta, it’s a little buggy, and deffinitly needs some refinement. But we figured what better way to figure out what to refine, then just to release it and let our customers tell us. Right now you can do the following things:

• Find new fans to follow. You may already have people talking about your company on Twitter but you may not be following them back.  Discover who they are and follow them with a simple click of a button.
• Discover new customer leads to follow. Search by keywords to discover people that you aren’t following yet but could be your next great new customer.
• Unfollow those who’ve said thanks but no thanks. Discover the people who you’ve been following but have decided not to follow you back. Unfollow them with a simple click of a button (yes sometimes a harsh harsh world).

Please let us know (via email: “talktous at socialguides.com” or through twitter: @socialguides) if you have any questions or ideas about this tool - it’s still pretty early.  For now while we are testing we’ve limited it’s use to once per day. So, if you like it and want to use it more, let us know that too

So we’ve got a confession to make. We cheated. That’s right we cheated. When a customer would initially setup an account with us, we’d have them fill out a form, then we’d sort of create an account behind the scenes (wizard of oz style). Then magically in a little bit they’d be able to login (through an admittedly weird process of using your twitter username & password [something us geeky types call oauth]). Anyways it was all a little too ducktape and bailing wire-ish for our tastes, so we decided to fully automate the process.

Now, as a business, you can newly get access to our social dashboard and social deals, by simply creating a SocialGuides business account in two simple steps. 1) Enter your info. 2) Associate your Twitter & Facebook credentials. And BAM your done. In the dashboard and ready to go. See doesn’t that feel nice? Instant gratification. Will it change your life? Perhaps not. But we’re stoked. And oh ya, the dashboard is still free, so get it while it’s hot. http://www.socialguides.com/new_business_user

So in case you haven’t heard there’s this rather small (600M people and counting) little social network called Facebook. Yet you probably haven’t heard our team at SocialGuides talk about Facebook publicly, much. Why? Well because our name has the word “social” in it…so umm there. Well, no, in all seriousness it’s simply because as small teams go, you have to stay pretty laser focused. So we made a concerted effort to start first with Twitter, because we thought helping businesses build, manage, and monetize the customer relationships within the more open platform was the best place to start. And so now, with our dashboard, listings, and deals products we think we’ve done a really great start at covering the basics of the customer cycle with Twitter. But, obviously…well…there’s been a giant elephant in the room, Facebook. So without further ado we’ve introduced our first Facebook integration into SocialGuides.

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One of the most common questions we get from businesses exploring the idea of using social media as an outreach avenue to new customers is: isn’t Twitter just a bunch of people in a noisy room shouting at each other? Of course you might be surprised at my response…
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