You know the kind of campaign I’m talking about: “Post about us on Twitter by saying, ‘I’m pandering for Major Corp!’ and you’ll be entered for our Grand Prize!”  Sometimes if the prize is worth it, I’ll even do it, but it doesn’t leave me feeling better about myself–or any more connected to the company.  Instead, I end up feeling like your company’s tool, and certainly not inclined to remain loyal.  Why would I want to be loyal to a company that uses me?  So if you are thinking about doing a sweepstakes, bear that in mind.

I have another suggestion for how to approach the sweepstakes: the surprise sweeps! Rather than require people to abase themselves to win your approval, why not reward those who are already singing your praises?

Here’s what I mean: suppose someone tweets about how great you are.  Why not offer them a small prize for their comment?  Tweet your thanks and ask them to DM you for a coupon or gift certificate.  You’ll be rewarding genuine loyalty and real customers rather than ginning up comments from people who just want something from you.

Obviously, this is a very different marketing campaign than a sweepstakes, and a sweepstakes has its place.  But as you monitor your social media channels from day to day, offer your thanks and reward your loyal customers.  Their good word of mouth is worth more than a thousand cheap tweets any day.

Of course it wasn’t as straightforward as that, and of course I wasn’t going to get a profit for the car. And I was fine with that until the very end when I had made it clear there was no deal and needed to leave.

The dealer had taken the car key and registration to inspect the car while they eased my friend and me into another car for a test drive. Our salesperson—a perfectly pleasant woman and the only female car salesperson I’ve ever met—finally, I thought, understood that we were through, that there was nothing more for her to do or say.  The only thing left from my perspective was to get my keys and let us go.  She went, I thought, to get them.

And the manager came out.

And I lost it.

He held out his hand to shake, and I didn’t take it. “You won’t even shake my hand?” he said. “I just want my keys and registration,” I said, and apparently my voice was raised. “Don’t yell at me,” he said. So I lowered my voice to a threatening growl and said, “Please get us the keys and registration.” And I am sorry to say he decided the thing to do was carry on with his patter. I turned to my friend and said, “I’m going to the car and will meet you there” and walked out of the showroom.  And I assure you, I will never return.
But in that moment, I learned a very important distinction between sales and customer service.

In sales, the goal is always the sale: edging the buyer ever closer to the decision point, inching them along through the sales process.  Failure is when the buyer doesn’t buy.

In customer service, the goal is always making sure customers get what they want:  that may or may not be the product.  Failure is when the customer leaves unhappy.

These two states flow into one another, of course. I think the best sales people know intuitively when to switch from sales mode to customer service, getting the best of both worlds.

What’s unfortunate in this situation is that they lost both a sale and a customer. If they had used just a touch of customer service and left their comfortable sales techniques for a moment, I would not have left angry and determined never to go there again.

I suspect this distinction and tendency between using a sales model or a customer service model–or switching between the two–becomes part of the make-up of any organization.  That same tendency, whatever it is, is no doubt reflected in your marketing and social media. And it’s going to color how people perceive you in the social media sphere. And I assure you, if your organization is exclusively in sales mode, it is not going to do well in social media.

So take a look at your organization and ask yourself: are you in sales or in customer service? Do you know when to quit pressing the sell and simply respond to your customer’s needs? Do you know when to say to your customer, “Hey, I have something you could use. Let’s make a deal”?  Do you need to tweak your social media–and your organization–to better serve your customers as well as have a better rate of return?

So this is an unscientific experiment: what happens when I post a blog and link to Twitter at a terrible time of the week? Will it get noticed, and when and how? I’ll post an update on what happens.

And, because I am curious, what do you find are your best times to post? Do they fall in line with the research?

But making a great video won’t help if people can’t find it, and searches still take place using text queries.  So when you post your video to YouTube, pay attention to the text around it!

Here are the places where keywords will make a difference:

1)     Title  Make it catchy, but make sure it’s not obscure! Think like the person you want to find you. What is the question they are asking? Can the title of your video be the answer to that question? For example: if the question is “How do I open a jar of pickles?”, the title might be “How to open a jar of pickles,” or (more amusingly) “Release the gherkin!” If you do a catchy headline that doesn’t quite match what people are asking, take full advantage of the description window to spell out what your video offers.  What you don’t want for a title is something vague and non-descriptive.  If someone is searching for “How do I open a jar of pickles?”, they are not going to find “Watch how I do this! It’s easy!”

2)     Description  USE THIS! Be aware that there’s a 5,000 character limit on the description, but you can fit in quite a bit in 5,000 characters.  Consider that people are only going to see the first paragraph when they come to the video page, so include the most important information first. Again, put yourself in the searcher’s mind; what are they asking? Answer that question in as close to their own language as you can! It’s not about what YOU know; it’s about what they want to know, so be careful about jargon.  Also, don’t forget to include your website address in your description!

3)     Categories  Put yourself in what you think will be the most effective category. If you have a funny video about an upcoming event, do you want it in “comedy” or in “travel & events”? My inclination would be to go with “travel & events” since your object is to promote your event, rather than simply be funny.  But my feeling is also that this matters less than having an effective description and good tags.

4)     Tags Again, consider what your potential viewers might be looking for. Use Google itself to see what alternate suggestions come up when you type in your initial search term.  You can use slight variations to words to help more people find you.  For our pickle jar example, you can use pickle, pickles, pickle jar, opening jars, opening pickle jar…you get the idea.  Tags are limited to 120 characters.

Here’s another tip:

Take a look at other YouTube videos that come up when you search for your field or area—not the videos themselves, but the titles, descriptions, and tags. What can you learn from what they posted? And what do you have to offer that they don’t? How can you set yourself apart in the search field?

Again, if you take advantage of the textual part of your YouTube postings, the chances of more people seeing your product or service will increase dramatically.