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By JeffreyRomano, March 23, 2010 12:29 am

Last Tuesday I attended the Social Media World Forum in London. Going to an international social media conference was a first for me and going round the various exhibitor stands and attending several of the workshops was in many ways an exciting experience.

From the event it was clear that there were two main issues dominating the workshops (I just attended the free workshops not the conference). Firstly, measuring the ROI of social media campaigns was clearly on the mind of many present at the event. It is clear that the recession has put a lot of pressure on agencies and in-house marketing teams to provide hard data proving that any investments in social media marketing are worth it. Of course it’s very understandable that providing metrics for ROI purposes is an issue since companies are spending over 100k, and in some cases millions of dollars in leveraging social media.

There was also a lot of hype about maximizing the use of Facebook. If one considers the fact that Facebook now has over 400 million users worldwide, the hype is logical. Workshops focused on analytics available to Facebook advertisers, using Facebook applications to generate viral trends, and leveraging Fan pages to build brand loyalty. In terms of marketing on Facebook, it became clear that Maltese businesses still have a lot of opportunity to be innovators on the local scene.

I will be doing my best to keep my posts brief, however I shall be discussing what came out of the event in much more detail in the posts to come.  Watch for at least two entries a week on this blog from now on. Finally, please give a shout out with whatever you’d like to see discussed here in the future.

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By JeffreyRomano, June 12, 2009 6:18 pm

In less than a day, Facebook (FB) will allow its users to choose a username for their profile. There has been quite a bit of fuss about this development, even though it might not seem significant to the average joe. To use a cliche’,  what’s in a (user)name, right?

Well in this case, the username FB users choose will help simplify the URL that points to their FB profile. To take my profile as an example, my current URL is http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Jeffrey-Romano/563707463, quite a handful for my liking. Using the new username system the whole thing would look much simpler. To give an example, this is the profile page URL of the White House (they get a username before us normal people) www.facebook.com/whitehouse. 

This change in profile URLs is pretty significant because it means that when somebody types in your name in Google, Yahoo, Bing or wherever, there is a better chance of your FB coming up. This can be a good thing, especially for businesses.

However, if in your profile you have loads of fun pictures and videos you posted when you were at one of those end of exam bashes last year, then I’d suggest thinking twice about making your FB profile more visible. Considering that the people who normally look up other people in search engines are future employers, prospective clients, etc., then it is hard to justify why you’d want to show them how much fun you can be after you downed an x number of beers.

In all honesty though, regardless of your name, you can pinpoint a lot of people on FB if you know their name and where they live.  If you do not want your private information to be visible, then go through your privacy settings and set everything so that only your friends can see your details. After this, I would still be careful about what I post on FB.  Mainly because you and not Facebook are responsable to what happens to the content you post, and yes this includes deleted information. Check this for more info.

Does this change my attitude towards Facebook?

Well in a way, this move has made me more aware that FB wants to make it easier for people to get to specific profiles more directly. I’m not totally for this because I prefer it when people access my profile through the news feed or something. It somehow feels less like someone is stalking me. After all, why should someone want to know my profile URL?  If the answer is ‘no reason’, then there is exactly ‘no reason’ why I would want my profile URL to be easy to remember. If the answer is ‘to know more about me’, then people can visit my LinkedIn profile. 

When I started using Facebook, it was never my intention to share information with people unknown to me. I encourage people who see FB like me to think twice about Facebook URL vanity.

My advice, unless you want to be found, don’t make it easy for other people to find you. According to FB, using your nickname as your username is completely legit (hint hint).

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By JeffreyRomano, June 8, 2009 1:22 pm

Recently, I had a bad experience with a company selling training material. I had ordered a particular product and had mistakenly been provided and charged for another more expensive one. Naturally, I was not too happy about this, especially since I was not sure what the benefits of the more expensive product included.

So I opened a ticket with customer support complaining. I also complained on Twitter. After a few hours, to my complete surprise, I receive an email from customer support titled something like ‘Follow up on Twtiter complaint.’  The company apologised, gave me the correct product and provided me with an explanation of what the benefits of the more expensive product were.  

Turns out both products are pretty cool and I won’t be asking for my money back again. I might even buy something else from them in the near future. Customer Support managed to turn an angry customer into a satisfied one. Mission accomplised. Naturally, they also earned some Twitter praise too.

Conversations on Twitter are very often ‘branded’ in the sense that a very high percentage of conversations (if not Tweets) center around brands and what they are doing. This fact is very important to customer support departments in particular, who are now increasingly listening in on what their customers are saying in contrast to simply acting on direct complaints they receive.

My personal definiton of customer support is “the way in which the brand meets its customers’ needs after a purchase has been completed.” Taking this into consideration, brands can benefit a lot by seeing what their customers are saying via Twitter’s search function. In my case, a recognition of my complaint and one email turned me from this to this

Another useful tool is the Google feature allowing you to see what new online content related to your brand has been generated within the last day, week or any other time period.  This can be a very helpful tool not only for reputation management but also to spot unhappy customers. It is a more time-consuming process than just following Tweets, though it can be very effective and impressive on the customer.

This creative use of the expanding social aspect of the web is increasingly becoming expected by customers. When I complained on Twitter I half expected some kind of recognition of my complaint and this is partly because more and more companies are using Twitter for customer support. For more information on companies which use Twitter for this purpose, check out this article by Sarah Perez. If you are interested in implementing Twitter in your company’s customer support, read this How To article on Mashable.

If you have valuable insights or links on this topic, feel free to contribute via the comments section.