How to Make Customers Look Good Online

Last week, I blogged that the key to engaging your customers is to make them look good. Several of my good readers asked, “how?”  So, in this post, let me give you some ideas for how to engage customers by making them look good online.

First, I recommend you read my posts What is a Social Offer and the infographic From Social Media Goals to Social Offers. How you make your customers look good depends very much upon who they are, what communities they are active in, and their personal and professional goals for participating in those communities. Your customers have many different facets to their online personalities. To be most effective, you need to understand who your customers are online and then find ways to give them what they want.

That said, here are some common goals that customers have, and ideas of how you might help them while helping your business.

I want to look smart

Especially in professional networks (LinkedIn) or groups, users love the chance to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise.

Tech forums have long employed “gamification” strategies to leverage users’ desire to look smart.  For example, in many tech forums, contributors earn kudos, stars, and titles, based on the number of their contributions and the ratings that their answers receive. The business running the forum gets publicity, SEO benefits, and offsets support costs as users answer each other’s questions.

Ideas:

• Ask specific questions that your fans/followers can answer, and which give them a chance to shine.
• Call out great answers your users provide. Compile them into a blog post, giving credit to those who answered, including links to their websites/social accounts (with permission).
• Create a series that highlights people’s expertise, similar to my Friday Fives series or Jayme Soulati’s Influencer one.  Invite experts to answer questions, again with plenty of exposure for them.
• Implement a simple reward or badge system, for the best question or answer of the week or month. Call the person out on your blog and social accounts.

I want to look cool

At a Social Media Club Seattle event I attended about social media and politics, one of the panelists was Alison Byrne Fields, who worked on the Rock the Vote campaign during the 2008 presidential election. She mentioned that a lot of youth talked about and fanned Obama’s Facebook page. The majority of them did it, though, not because they were politically aware and felt strongly. They did it to LOOK politically aware and cool.

We all want to look cool online. If you can help your customers look cool, they are more likely to fan your page and share your content. (Of course, what’s “cool” depends very much upon the particular social audience you’re targeting. Hence the need for research, first.)

Ideas:

• Post content on your page that your audience will want to share. Don’t just post what you want them to read (about you or your company). Think, “what will they want to share; what content would make them look good to their friends.”
• Create spaces on your website or blog where customers can show-off. Enable your audience to add content or comments that will make them look good to their friends, and that they will therefore want to share–as a link to your site. For example, if you host events, can attendees upload tagged pictures, in a way that lets them share the specific picture on their own social accounts?
• Look at some of the new Gamification platforms or build a custom Facebook application with gamification elements that make the user look cool. You might offer badges they can display or enable them to automatically publish to their wall the fact that they reached a new status, bought a new guitar, ordered tickets for your event.

I want to look like a good citizen

This is where I think a lot of non-profits miss the boat. People want to look like they care, they contribute, that they are involved in making the world a better place. Give them the chance to share their positive actions with the world.

Ideas:

• Provide a way for people to automatically post that they have donated, attended, or otherwise supported your organization. It appears on their wall, showing their friends that they are involved and caring individuals (cool), and spreads the word about your organization.
• Let people earn status through their level of activity. The more active people are (donations, activities, etc.) the more status, titles, etc. they earn–all displayed publicly.
• Provide places on your website to highlight people who help. It might just be a list of the latest donors. It might be a place where people can tell their personal stories, where you can describe their contributions, and so on.
• Highlight your business sponsors and donors–and let them know you’re doing it. If you solicit donations and sponsorship from businesses, then spend time regularly highlighting those businesses.

I want publicity

If yours is a B2B market (or a non-profit that has business sponsors/donors), what your customers want most is more customers for themselves. Anything you can do to give them more, positive publicity is a good thing.

Ideas:

• Showcase your customers as it relates to your business. Do blog posts on their implementations or use of your products, put up pictures, talk about it on your own social accounts. Make sure your customers know you’re doing this.
• Provide links to customer sites and social accounts. Facebook lets you Like partner pages and it shows those pages on your own Facebook page. That’s a simple way to give some added visibility to your partners/customers. You could also create a tab on your Facebook page and/or a place on your website to specifically highlight customers/partners. Make sure to link to their websites and social accounts from that page.
• Share their content and news. Share your customers/partners’ press releases, their events, their new openings. You’re building a long-term relationship with these businesses. Add value for them by being another marketing channel for them, within reason.
• Invite them to contribute. Specifically reach out to selected customers or partners, to ask them to write blog posts, answer questions, and provide other opportunities for them to shine–in a way that also adds value for your audience.

There are lots of other ways to make your customer look good. It all depends upon your business and your customers. Now, it’s your turn to tell me: what ideas do you have and what techniques have you seen for making customers look good?