Tag Archives: Social media

Can we be friends?

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Coming from the financial industry, something that we were always told was to keep personal and business interactions completely separate. That meant don’t friend your co-workers on Facebook, don’t friend your vendors on Facebook, and definitely do not friend the investors you were working for on Facebook. I understood the reasons – there needs to be separation between the two, right? Of course, when you’re attending the conventions though, what do you end up talking about?  Your personal life – your children, the sports you play, and any other activities you engage in, so while I understood the advice, I always felt there was a bit of a contradiction.

When I started at VPS.NET in June of last year, I carried over much of this philosophy - I made some comprises; the basic premise was I would friend the person, as long I had met them in person before. Even with that compromise, I was still extremely closed off compared to a lot of people. As I built relationships with clients from VPS.NET, I realized that maybe my closed off strategy really wasn’t the best move; there’s a vast difference between the tech. industry and the financial industry. The age gap is no longer there – at the technology conventions we attend, like DrupalCon, the average age is no older 25.  All of our clients – they’re actually like us. So, the other day when the friend request from a client came in, I took a step towards a change and accepted the request.

There were a lot of reasons for the change. Some business, and some person. One of the primary lines of thought was that if I’m doing something and then putting it on Facebook that I’d embarrassed about if a client saw it, it’s probably something I shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Secondly, in the line of business we’re in, there’s not a whole lot of human interaction with our customers. There’s unfortunately no way to change that completely, but Facebook can help “humanize” things, and show that despite rumors, I’m not a virtualized robot given the power of life by VPS.NET. It’ll not only show my interests outside of VPS.NET but also help me learn yours, and then create the opportunity to share tips, and other ideas. Just the other day thanks to Facebook, I found out that Ditlev is a master of eating with chop sticks, something I’ve always wanted to learn how to do. At the next convention, I’m going to force him to share his skills — help me become a bit more cultured.

Before  you go the same route I did though, there’s certainly some things to consider:

1.) Take a look at your profile. Would your clients be comfortable using your services after seeing everything on it? This includes your posts, friends posts and any pictures you might have. Would you do business with yourself after seeing everything that is up there?
2.) Take advantage of the privacy settings – maybe you want to be friends with clients, but block off pictures and videos. That be easily done by setting up a group and restricting that groups access.
3.) If you still want to live the party boy life style, yet still connect with clients, maybe LinkedIn.com is a suitable compromise.

Ultimately, the decision is up to you – there’s no set in stone rule about friending clients. Your decision though can impact your business – use it right, and you might reap the  benefits. Use it wrong and an embarrassing picture pops up on a client’s news feed, you might want to re-consider the use of social networking.

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Social Media: How we use it, what we’ve learned, and how WE can do better!

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One of my favorite sites, GigaOm, posted an article yesterday “4 Social Media Marketing Tips That Work.” It prompted me to start thinking about how we use social media here at VPS.NET, and what benefits we see from it. There’s certainly no question that our use of social media, especially Twitter, has helped our company grow. We’ve landed clients, we’ve learned a lot about our downfalls, and we’ve built some very strong relationships with clients and vendors.

Transparency
The first thing I’ve noticed about social media is it forces you to be transparent with your actions. Both your good side and your bad side are shown to the public; if you handle the bad right, it’s overlooked. If you handle it wrong, it can ruin you. What can you do to avoid handling it wrong? Being human. Acknowledge the problem, explain how you’re going to fix it, and then put that plan into place.

Being Human
When we use Twitter, our goal isn’t to just send PR notifications; we want to be human. We want to engage the community, replying to fun tweets, retweeting stuff we find interesting, and interacting with our customers. It gives us the ability to truly know our client as a person, and it gives our clients the ability to know us as a person. It makes our relationship much more enjoyable and it removes the traditional vendor/client relationship, which is oh so boring.

Being Authentic
I mentioned earlier about having a plan and actually putting it into place. There’s nothing that I, as a client, hate more than false promises. When we put something out on our Twitter it becomes our mission to accomplish it. We know that if we promise something and it doesn’t come through, we lose our legitimacy as not only a vendor, but also a person, and that makes the importance of delivering on our promise so much more important.

What can we do better?
As we grow, I feel we need to continue to improve on our ability to know you. We not only need to make our Twitter name more well known. If you don’t know of our Twitter, it makes it hard for us to know you. Not only that, but there are many other social media applications, Facebook is one that comes to mind, that we don’t use to the full extent. Not everyone is on Twitter, and we shouldn’t force you to signup for Twitter. We need to come to you.

We also need to have more fun with social media applications. It gives us, and the VPS.NET brand personality. Now I don’t mean a joke of the day, but we need to engage the community better. Whether it be discussion questions, input on VPS.NET, or even social media specific promotions, we need to give you additional value for bringing you into our social media network.

Feel free to discuss your thoughts on social media. From what I’ve found, it’s really changed the way a lot of businesses operate, and I hope that we can continue to innovate the vendor/client relationship, and add value to our hosting services.

Follow us on Twitter: vpsnet

digg Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
reddit Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
stumbleupon Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
yahoo buzz Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
dzone Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
facebook Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
delicious Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
dotnetkicks Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
dotnetshoutout Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
linkedin Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
technorati Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
twitter Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!
google buzz Social Media: How we use it, what weve learned, and how WE can do better!