An Open Complaint to SiriusXM: The Hours Following the Post
A couple of days ago I wrote an article called Social Media Gone Wrong; An Open Complaint to SiriusXM, in which I threw the spotlight on the satellite radio giant for a number of issues both widespread and specific to me. Within hours of posting, the article quickly became one of the most viewed posts on my blog so I figured that in the interest of being fair and balanced the topic was worth a follow-up.
One of the claims that I made in the post was that SiriusXM had ignored all of the requests I made for help via social media (Twitter being the channel I turned to after numerous phone calls failed to solve my issue). While Twitter is not an official communications channel for the company I figured it was worth a shot, after-all one of the first rules of social media strategy is to monitor your mentions and reach out to your customers as applicable. Frustrated that no reply came after a handful of tweets over a 10 day period, I resorted to my blog, wrote the post, and published it through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Admittadly, what happened next surprised me.
LinkedIn, 100M & Growing Strong
This morning, Donna Antoniadis (@DonnaAntoniadis) tweeted a link to an article about LinkedIn hitting 100 million members, and it got me to thinking about the size of the core social media networks. Many of us in the professional world have a LinkedIn profile, but because LinkedIn is rarely in the media, the perception is there that it’s a much smaller network. At 100 million users it’s still “significantly” smaller than Twitter (with ~175 million active accounts), but on the corporate blog LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner says they’re growing at a million new members every week, which is pretty significant for the site that puts the “networking” in social networking.
(Personal) Brand Awareness
Successful brands have been balancing the line between print, web, and brick-and-mortar elements for decades. With the rapid adoption of social media, that trend has continued to the familiar social media tools we all use every day. The limitations of avatars, and sometimes little options for customization have forced us to be a little creative, but an uncompromising implementation of the brand is almost always possible.
Dell is one of those companies that has traversed the plethora of social media networks without compromising the integrity of the brand (which after-all, is the point). Support forums are easily recognizable with the Dell moniker, tweets carry the familiar Dell logo, the YouTube channel is heavily customized, and most importantly everything is consistent.
Now, you may be wondering why I put “Personal” in the title if we’re going to talk about Dell. The point here is that the same strategy of a major brand can also apply to your personal brand. There’s two schools of thought on personal brands: 1- branding is a big corporate term (so why should I care), and 2- there’s value in providing a consistent, recognizable, and professional image of yourself across multiple mediums. The first rule applies to those of you who are just casual users; you’re the people that use Facebook to just talk to family, Twitter to tell me that you and your BFF are going roller skating, and have no idea what LinkedIn is. For you, it doesn’t matter if your Facebook picture is a weekend snap of you drunk at a party, or your Twitter avatar is the default Twitter bird, because well, it just doesn’t matter. The second rule applies to anyone who uses a combination of these services in a professional capacity, such as selling a product, supporting a product, blogging, professional networking, or community involvement.
Extend your brand; Friendly social media URLs
It’s no secret that your social media identities really are an extension of your brand. They’re powerful (often revenue generating) assets that in some cases may generate more traffic than your website. If you’re a company or organization that’s very active in the social media world then it’s probably in your best interest to promote your various social media identities on your company collateral, website, business cards, etc. That said, several of the popular social media platforms have failed in making your content easy for people to access. Sure, twitter.com/webdes03 and facebook.com/webdes03 are simple enough, but I don’t particularly find “http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-greene/5/576/4a5” something that belongs on a business card–and it’s certainly not something people are going to remember.
Luckily there’s a simple way to get yourself a friendly URL to replace that ugly one, and provide a consistent URL pattern to all of your social media identities. If your website is hosted with a company that gives you access to cPanel, Plesk, or one of the other popular hosting management tools, you can simply add a new subdomain and redirect it to the appropriate social media identity. Here’s an example of the process you’d follow to set this up using cPanel.