Friday, September 24, 2010

Facebook Goes Down. Businesses Panic.

A Forbes Magazine blog reported that when Facebook went down this week, any number of businesses became invisible. No Web presence. No opportunity to showcase their wares and converse with their customers. Panic ensued.

While social media is an important part of an overall communications strategy, no company should rely solely on it to communicate. And to rely solely on Facebook is so short-sighted as to be crazy.

It's understandable for small companies looking to spend zero on marketing. There's always a tendency to gravitate toward free media like Facebook. Let's face it, the only investment with Facebook is time. No big ad bills. No creative to pay for. But a social-media-only approach is not a clever communication strategy. It's more of a desperation strategy.

Social media has undoubtably helped many small businesses to grow and become better known. It's helped several larger businesses bond better with their supportive customers and soothe the savage beast in the unruly ones. It's even boosted sales so that some companies have parleyed social media into big rewards.

But this week's Facebook outage should be eye opening. A wake up call. Not because it was Facebook, but because a strategy that relies on one communication channel rarely works in the long run. As the old saying goes, don't ever put all your eggs in one basket.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Reports: Are They Really Worth The Time?

Client reports. Those monthly catalogues of what we did and did not accomplish for clients.

Are they fun to do? No.

Do all clients read them? No.

Then why do we need to spend precious time doing them?

Many client interactions are via email, leaving an electronic trail (stream) that can chronicle activity and results.

Post-it notes serve as handy reminders.

What about the highlights of important conversations jotted down in a notebook?

With all that information floating around, is it really worth the time to do monthly reports?

Absolutely.

A monthly report consolidates all of the month's activities in one place that's easy to reference if the client has questions.

More importantly, it can be a quick source of answers to questions that come up months down the road (who wants to sort through 20 emails trying to reconstruct what happened six months ago?)

A report can provide you with much-needed historical reference when staff has departed.

As a concise summary, it serves as an overview of activities, client approvals and outcomes. Your back-up includes the emails, little post-it notes, and notebook jottings carrying the daily details.

So what should go into a monthly client report?

The time you've put in on the client project. The results of that project. The steps you took to get there and your next steps. The media you contacted and the outcome of those interactions. A summary of other relevant business.

While you may hate reporting, it's a tool that turns out to be important when you least expect it to be — like when a retainer client has questions about direction, performance or approval.

That's when those dreaded monthly reports may just save the account.