According to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ video from Socialnomics, 96% of Generation Y or Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000 or thereabouts) are part of an online social network and yet the fastest growing segment of Facebook is females aged 55-65 years old.

Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama, and half the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old and email is considered old technology by a significant number of them.

We are connecting, communicating and revealing personal and professional details about ourselves more openly than ever before. In the time it takes to read this post around 50 hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine.

We tap out information about ourselves at the stroke of a key and yet rarely think about the damage that can be caused to our reputation, both online and off, by posting careless remarks and images.

Even if we don’t write the words ourselves, others are writing about us, and in this digital age of instant upload it’s worth remembering that the camera is always rolling, the microphone is always on, and there’s no such thing as ‘off-the-record’.

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For many businesses, particularly those providing services, more than 85% of business comes from personal referrals and recommendations. Yet many businesses spend thousands of hours, and dollars, trying to acquire new customers, and relatively little time and effort nurturing and retaining their existing ones.

Valuing and retaining your current clients and customers is essential. Not only will you benefit from their continued custom directly, you are also more likely to benefit from any new clients or customers they recommend. And given that it’s 6-7 times more expensive to gain one new client or customer than it is to retain one, retaining your existing clients and customers, and being highly recommendable, can have a huge positive impact on your profitability.

Clients and customers who already trust and respect you:

• are more likely to acknowledge, and value, what you provide and the benefits they gain from dealing with you
• may be more willing to accept your prices, terms and conditions without question or negotiation
• are often more loyal
• require less ’selling to’ and
• are more likely to continue doing business with you, and even increase the amount they spend, as their trust in you increases.

They are also significantly more likely to recommend you to people they know and trust giving you an opportunity to gain new clients whilst reducing your acquisition costs and improving your profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

Much like the Kryptonite bike lock debacle back in 2005, the Sons of Maxwell ‘United breaks guitars’ video  continues to be picked up on the web and damage United’s reputation.

When the airline damaged a $3,500 Taylor guitar and refused to accept liability, or provide any kind of compensation, Dave Carroll hit back where it hurt – right at their reputation.

According to a Mashable blog post written just after the video was posted in August last year, the video accrued around 3.2 million views and 14,000 comments less than 10 days after it was uploaded.

Today the clip’s been viewed more than 7.5 million times and continues to circulate on the internet in a practical demonstration of word-of-mouth becoming word-of-mouse.

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New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Think social media doesn’t matter to you, your business or your reputation? Think again!  Socialnomics’ ‘Social Media Revolution’ clip on YouTube is doing an excellent job of showing how important social media is, and will continue to be, to all of us – both as consumers and product and service providers.

There are currently more than 200 million blogs with 54 percent bloggers posting content or tweeting daily.  Around 34 percent of these bloggers are posting opinions about products and brands online. What might they be saying about you?

It’s worth giving it some thought as around 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, but only 14 percent trust advertisements.  I wonder why?!

Now, you might think ‘all this web stuff’s not for me’ and you may be right. But celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres currently have more followers on Twitter than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. Read the rest of this entry »

Two stories caught my eye this week regarding companies making claims they apparently haven’t been able to keep.

The first is Telecom who’s reached a settlement with the Commerce Commission following its admission it misled around 130,000 broadband customers regarding pricing plans. Apparently it overcharged customers more than $9.5 million between 1999 and 2006 when dial-up customers switched to broadband.

Although Telecom has refunded almost all these customers, since 2003 it has apparently received warnings, settlements or convictions relating to the Fair Trading Act at least eight times. Read the rest of this entry »

2009 was the year the rules changed. The ‘who cares?’ attitude that seemed to dominate so many of our businesses, and personal interactions, up until then finally faced a reality check. Suddenly, large numbers of us started to care.

We cared about whether our life-savings and investments would still be around for us to draw on so we could enjoy a comfortable and happy retirement. We cared that our order books were shrinking and our debtors were taking longer to pay, or not paying at all. We cared that the jobs we were in, and the businesses we ran, would continue to generate income so we could keep paying the bills and live the life we’d become accustomed to. Read the rest of this entry »

When things go wrong, the importance on focusing on the overall experience, rather than just the problem, is beautifully highlighted in Sean D’Souza’s New Zealand Herald article ‘Fix the experience – not just the fish’.

Often, when a service provider is challenged for a failing in some way, they focus purely on fixing the problem. Whilst this is hugely important, it’s only one part of a two-part process that will create client or customer satisfaction. Read the rest of this entry »