As I’ve said many (many) times before, Twitter is a great tool for connecting with current and potential customers. You can monitor your brand easily with it, offer special deals or discounts to only your Twitter followers, engage in conversations in your industry, and on and on.

But what about gauging the wants and needs of your customers?

The ISO 9001 standard requires that you satisfy your customers by identifying customer requirements, meeting those requirements, and enhancing customer satisfaction. At Bizmanualz, we do this a number of ways, including offering customer feedback forms, surveying our customers, interviewing current and potential clients, documenting and correcting nonconformities, and capturing as much feedback data as possible. We call it analyzing the “voice of the customer.”

But be careful if you’re thinking that monitoring Twitter and other social media answers some of that requirement.

Twitter users react immediately and loudly to anything they see as a disruption of their consumer trust because they know the brands are “listening.” For example, back in November Motrin released a video that portrayed mothers carrying babies in slings doing so as a fashion statement. Well, the Tweets hit the fan. Motrin soon pulled the video. A great example of listening to the customers’ needs and wants?

Maybe. But that’s assuming Twitter users are your primary customer. If you’re like our company, whose largest set of customers are CEOs of small-to-medium-sized businesses, Twitter users are most likely not your target buyer. A recent release of Twitter demographics shows that the site attracts mostly young adults and that the typical user also reads TechCrunch. In my own experience, I’ve found that many of the users are self-proclaimed “social media gurus,” “strategists,” “experts,” and the like who have an affinity for everything online marketing. Your target audience?

Should you listen? Absolutely. All information is helpful. But ISO is about gathering ALL data, assessing it, looking for trends, and then acting based on that. Beware of knee-jerk reactions to the noisy few.

Today is a big day here at Bizmanualz.  Colin Gray from Platinum Registration is conducting our first-ever ISO 9001 certification audit. (Yes, we are going for our ISO certification.) Over the past couple of years, we’ve been incorporating the ISO process model into the way we do business.

Colin Gray (left), Platinum Registration auditor, reviews visual management board with Bizmanualz managing director Chris Anderson (right).

There are many posts and articles on our site about ISO 9001, so I don’t need to explain it here. In this post, I’ll offer my perspective as a non-ISO sales and marketing guy on the importance of ISO 9001 to sales, marketing, growth, and the health of our organization.

ISO 9001 gives us the common language, measurement, and follow-through tools we need to achieve our goals for ourselves and our clients. ISO helps us do what we say we will do and achieve what we want to achieve. Simply put, ISO 9001 helps us walk the walk.

If you sell services for a living (like I do), you probably know where I’m going with this. Every time you meet with a prospect or client, you put your reputation on the line. Doing your job requires that clients trust you enough to share their problems with you. Keeping that trust depends on your and your organization’s consistent performance, keeping promises made to each and every client. And that’s what ISO 9001 helps us do — it helps us keep the promises that we make.  And that is “performance by design, not by accident,” as Colin said during our opening audit meeting.

ISO Helps Us Define and Deliver Customer Solutions Reliably, Predictably

Assessing client needs, defining solutions, and developing plans to meet the needs is what I do as a sales executive. Statements of work (SOWs) I write are promises that we are built to keep because we are built using ISO. While all successful sales people grasp the importance of uncovering customer’s needs, ISO has helped us dig deeper to uncover multifaceted and sometimes conflicting needs. ISO has helped us understand risks to performance and to client’s satisfaction with our work. ISO has helped us dig deeper. ISO has helped us verify that we are meeting customer needs. ISO has helped us improve continuously. ISO has helped me become a better sales executive. We’re writing an article this month about how we used ISO-inspired planning to select and pursue sales targets for a client, part of our sales and marketing services for them.

ISO Helps Us Communicate More Effectively

Applying the Plan-Do-Check-Act, or PDCA, model — the basis of ISO 9001 — to our marketing process has helped make our marketing results predictable. “Planning” when preparing product descriptions, case studies, and other communications means listening to customers. “Checking” means measuring customer reaction and behavior on our web sites, and asking them directly what they are getting from our marketing stories. “Acting” means improving our stories based on what customers tell us. In essence, ISO reinforces a culture of listening to customers. We are working on an article this month that compares and contrasts one client who demonstrates the value of listening, and one that simply tells their story no matter what their customers are telling them.

ISO helps us take concrete steps every day to attain our goals and aspirations for ourselves and our clients.  Our articles this month will show how ISO thinking and tools has helped me make and keep promises in Sales, and communicate more effectively in Marketing. Check back soon. If you haven’t signed up to receive our articles, do it now — you won’t want to miss out!

In her last blog post, Sandi Villarreal wrote about social marketing and what it means or could mean to your company. And as she wrote, as long as you know what is working and what is not, you’re on the right track.

One of my favorite quotes is from the great Yogi Bera – “if you don’t know where you are going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.”

Funny as it may be, it’s apt for social marketing and other business activities. Setting goals is important. If you are randomly doing things without being mindful of the goals and objectives of your organization, then the results may not be what you expected. That is, if you expected results in the first place.

There may be various reasons why one gets into social media to begin with. It may be brand/awareness building, creating buzz, or explicitly pushing your products/services. Whatever the reason(s) may be, you should carefully think it through before you get into blogging, facebook, twitter, or other social media outlets.

If your goal is to simply learn and increase your (and your organization’s) knowledge about social media, that’s fine. If the objective is to increase your leads, or website traffic, that’s fine too, but you need to have an idea about the social media channels will fulfill your specific objective(s).

The point is to have a plan or objective in place before you embark on your social media journey. This way, you can measure your progress/performance at regular intervals. Are you increasing your knowledge? Are you increasing leads or traffic?

Marketing is all about building a relationship with your customers. In many cases, social media can be tremendously helpful in helping you do just that. However, in other cases, it may not do much for you. Ultimately, you have to decide not only where you are going, but why you want to get there.

For all of the so-called social media “experts,” “gurus,” etc., there are really very few who actually know what they’re doing. And it’s for good reason: nobody has all of the answers yet. What works for some people will fail miserably for others. In my blog posts, I aim to offer advice that I’ve found helpful, but beware of anyone who claims extensive knowledge in the field before showing you actual results.

This blog post on Applicant.com goes into more depth about the latest Internet marketing trend of supposed “gurus,” but the point is that social marketing is more about you and your relationship with your customer/potential customer than it is about garnering big numbers that don’t convert into sales.

Look at the Skittles social media experiment for a minute. It was all about exposure. Exposure to your brand is great, but how much time and effort was put into that experiment? And did they sell more Skittles? We don’t know. All we know is the company website received a 1332% traffic increase in one day. The next day? Back to normal. (Graphic via marketingpilgrim.com)

It’s as gimmicky as tucking “Free iPod” into your website text to receive organic traffic. Yes, people come to your website, but are they the right people? Will they buy your product, or did they just want a free iPod? (P.S. – People aren’t stupid. Most see through lame marketing ploys.)

Other admissions: the most successful “social media” tool we’ve used so far is this right here—our blog, coupled with our articles and weekly e-newsletter. It provides information and doesn’t force our products down people’s throats. We truly are interested in the conversation. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., are all showing promise, but we don’t know just yet. No one really does.

The value is there, and more and more, it’s becoming a necessary skill for Internet marketers. But it doesn’t take a “Social Media Expert” to do it for you. Start with your own marketing staff or take it over yourself. Find what works for you. You may find it breaks all of the “rules” of social media.

If you haven’t already entered into the microblogging world of Twitter, read my previous post for a how-to guide. Once you’ve got the service down, and you’re regularly Tweeting at least a few times a day, you should begin to see a decent stream of traffic to your website and be engaged in some discussions with others in your network.

Now it’s time to take it up a notch.

You’ve probably heard of a few Twitter applications at this point. HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Tweetr all provide a more user-friendly interface to Tweet from. Some have features like scheduling Tweets and being able to log into multiple accounts at once.

Here’s my list of the most useful applications that can help with your business networking.

1. Twitter Tools on WordPress
   

   If your company’s blog is hosted on WordPress, I highly recommend installing this plugin. Once installed, each time you publish a blog post, it’s automatically fed into your Twitter feed. You can also opt to not Tweet the post by unchecking a box at the bottom of your WP posting form.

2.  Tweet This
   Similar to Twitter Tools, this plug-in works with your WordPress blog. While Twitter Tools allows you to Tweet your blog post from the user interface, Tweet This lets your readers Tweet the post from their accounts, allowing for more dissemination of your blog posts and more exposure.
   
3. TweetStats
   

   Simply enter your Twitter username, and the application graphs your account information and trends. I learned that my highest Tweeting day is Thursday, and most of my Tweets hover around 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. It shows that 16% of my Tweets are @replies (which should probably be higher), and that I Tweeted 118 times in February compared with only 81 times in January.

   Why is this helpful? If you’re new to Twitter, like Bizmanualz is, it’s important to know where you’re lacking. Taking this information, I learned that I should probably throw out a few more Tweets midday-maybe I’ll reach a different audience. I should probably Tweet more Monday through Wednesday and reply to more friends’ posts. 

4. Twimailer
   

   Have you gotten into the habit of auto-following everyone who follows you? At first it seems like a good idea. You don’t have that many followers, and the more people you follow, the wider your network and reach will be. But … Bizmanualz publishes prewritten business policies and procedures-so why would we want to follow an Australian surfing blogger? At some point, your network will become diluted with people whose updates you don’t really read and who don’t read yours.

   When you sign up for Twimailer, instead of receiving the typical “so-and-so is now following you on Twitter,” you received a more detailed history, including their past 20 Tweets, number of followers and number of people who are following them. Then you can decide whether to follow them back.

5.  Twollow
   

   So I know I just said it was dangerous to auto-follow others. But there is a way to do so without diluting your conversation topics. Twollow lets you enter in specific keywords and choose to auto-follow anyone who Tweets those keywords. For example, I put in the word “Bizmanualz.” Twollow will automatically sign me up to follow anyone who is chatting about our company.

   You can also use this tool to follow the discussion on a list of keywords without actually auto-following. It’s a great substitute for search.twitter.com because you can see the results for many keyword groups at once, and Twollow saves your list of keywords.

Are there any applications you would add? Let us know!

At Bizmanualz, we are constantly looking for improvement opportunities. Usually, these are small, incremental improvements that add up to make a positive impact to our customers, our internal processes or our employees. These improvements are our Kaizens.

When we noticed that our online shopping cart was getting old, slow and “user-unfriendly,” we decided to go for a complete makeover. However it required going through a series of steps. Unlike our regular smaller Kaizens, this would be a bigger project that would require participation from a larger group of people.

Reviewing Customer Requirements

Based on customer feedback and best practices, a set of customer requirements emerged. The new cart would need to have some features to meet customer expectations.

The customer account interface needed to be robust and friendly. So when you purchased something from us, you would have to be able to log into your customer account and view, change or track your orders, or write a product review.

Download process for downloadable products needed to be more intuitive and failure-proof. The old cart sent download links via email, which would often land up in junk or spam folders. The new cart would have to be able to let you download your documents right on the website after your purchase, or via your customer account.

Shopping for a Shopping Cart

We had to decide whether to continue hosting the cart at our own servers and maintain greater control over the backend codes, or to use one of the myriads of “subscription” based cart solutions available in the marketplace.

After much deliberations and weighing the requirements as well as the time constraints, we decided to go with a subscription solution. And after researching several options, we decided to go with Volusion Inc’s shopping cart solution. Their cart has pretty much all the functionalities we wanted, is quite easy to use and provides enough customizability to modify the design, options and features. Their customer list is pretty impressive and [plug:] their tech support and customer service teams are very helpful, knowledgeable and patient.

Easy Transition

It took us a little over three weeks to setup, test, train, and launch the new shopping cart. Most of the process went along very smoothly. We did, however, come across some hurdles primarily because of us controlling the cart code. So we had to adjust our expectations and change the way we did certain things in the past.

To accommodate some of the hard-wired layouts in the new cart, we also had to slightly modify our website layout. So, instead of a 800 X 600 pixel design, most of our website now is laid out for 1024 X 768 resolution. This was fine, since most of our website visitors use this resolution or higher anyways.

Some challenges still remain, with regards website analytics, visitors tracking and full visual congruence, but we’ll address those as part of our continual improvement efforts.

What it Means to You

Visitors who’ve been to our website before will notice changes in terms of layout and certain visual elements, but the biggest change is the cart’s speed. It responds much better when you are navigating between pages. If you are browsing a particular product, it’s much easier to see other products in the same category.

Customer account interface is much improved too. Now you can view/change/track your orders very easily by logging into your account. You can also change your contact information, payment methods and easily write product reviews.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll also launch different options like automatic quantity discounts or the option to download your purchase right away.

All in all, the cart upgrade project was very satisfying and rewarding. We will always be on the lookout for ways to improve your experience at store.bizmanualz.com.

Directing traffic to your website using all the social media networks available is great. It’s part of what Internet marketing is all about. But what happens when the people get there? Driving traffic can only do so much if your website is ineffective.

So what are you looking for? I talked a bit about looking at your website from a usability standpoint in a previous post. It needs to be easily navigable to ensure that visitors can quickly find what they are looking for. Users must easily be able to figure out how to contact you or submit a question. If the first thing your user sees when landing on your website is mass confusion, they’ll quickly bounce (pun intended).

Also remember that the entry point to your website is often not your homepage. Think about it: if you’re linking out specific blog posts, product pages, staff bios, etc., the user experience starts there and not at Point A. Take a look at some of those pages. Can you figure out how to get to the homepage? Are there clearly defined pathways to get where the user wants to be?

Another key to usability is checking your content on a variety of different browsers. Your pages may render perfectly in Firefox but make no sense in Internet Explorer 7 or 6 (something we at Bizmanualz run into often). But don’t just stop at the big browsers. Utilize your Google Analytics data to find out which browsers the majority of your visitors are using. It could be Safari for all you know. Start with the most popular and work down the list, making changes where practical. (Browsershots and other websites make this easy by comparing your page across most platforms.)

Finally, ask people their opinions. That’s what makes many of these social networks so beneficial. Post a question on Twitter asking your friends to test out your website and suggest changes. You’ll be surprised how many people in your network are willing to help you out.

It’s hard to get away from the big social media networks because that’s where all the people—and potential customers—are. I’m talking, of course, about Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.

The key is utilizing these mammoth social media sites to work for you, and they keep making it easier and easier as more networking sites make the shift to accommodate business.

On Facebook, create a Group or a Fan Page.

Fan pages are geared more toward commercial usage, but it depends on what kind of business you’re promoting. On the Bizmanualz Fan Page, we feed in our blog posts and articles, post photos and share information on our products, and provide information about upcoming training classes in the events section.

Search Engine Journal did a quick over view of the pros and cons of each. Check out the features and decide for yourself whether to launch a group or fan page.

Create an industry-related group on LinkedIn.

The distinction here is that it should be an industry-related group—not a “my product is awesome” group. The key is to discuss issues related to the products and services your company provides, as you are in a unique position to comment on them. This is not to say that you’re out to trick those who join into thinking the group is something it’s not. Make it clear who is behind it, just don’t shove a marketing message down their throats.

Bizmanualz has a LinkedIn group focused on Business Policies and Procedures, our core expertise. Users can post discussions, questions, news articles and get the discussion going on something the folks here at Bizmanualz are ready and willing to offer advice on.

Leverage Flickr to tell more about your company.

According to Flickr’s terms of service, you’re not allowed to sell anything or overtly use the site for commercial purposes. However, joining the photo-sharing community gives customers and potential customers another glimpse into the inner workings of your company—and people always love a good behind-the-scenes tour.

Post photos of everyday activities in the office, training sessions, product mock-ups, meeting notes, and other ideas. Users will begin to get to know you and your staff, and hopefully even send some thoughts your way about potential products/services (thus filtering into your customer requirements).

Basically, you want to be where the people are. You want to your customers to feel like they know you. When the person you’re doing business with is on the other side of a computer, it’s hard to achieve that, but these networks make it easier. Try one of these sites or all three and let us know how it’s working for you!

Unless you are a trained writer, it can be difficult to come up with fresh, new content at least once a day to keep your blog updated. Even if you are a quick writer, it takes time to do some background research and fully formulate an idea before you even begin to put pen to paper—er, finger to keypad.

Considering that we are supposed to be blogging in our “spare time,” it can often seem like a waste of time as paperwork begins to pile up on our desks. But what if you could get more mileage out of your posts than simply Tweeting out the link or RSS feeding it into your site?

Post it where others will read.

There are so many websites out there that are simply a network of articles, blog posts, or full blogs. So, you’ve Tweeted your post, but have you Stumbled it, Digg (Dugg?) it, posted it to Delicious? Does your blog have a Share This plug in so others can easily do the same?

You don’t have to span the whole wide world of social networking and post on every single site. You would need a full-time employee just to find all of them. But by making a checklist and checking off a few sites with each post, you increase the chances that your blog post will be one of the lucky ones that get noticed, or better yet, go viral.

Repurpose your content.

Sometimes a few tweaks and a couple of extra bullet points can turn your informal blog post into a perfect how-to article, ready to post on Work.com or Google Knol.

Work.com is a series of how-to guides from experts on a variety of subjects, and Google Knol is a new-ish form of Wikipedia with more design flexibility and greater restraints on who can amend your original content. The key for these sites is to make sure you’re being informative and refrain from overt marketing. Users on these sites can click on your profile and see your company information, but it’s somewhat of a no-no to push your product or service within the actual article.

In addition to the benefit of getting your company’s messages to more readers in more places, republishing content also provides valuable link backs if you’re posting to reputable sites. The more exposure for your company the better.

Has it worked for you? Are there other sites you’ve posted to that have been successful?

I love to preach the virtues of Twitter, but beware: it sucks you in. Unless you have the ability to devote quite a bit of time or you have a very multi-task-able staff member, Twitter may not be for you.

If you’re new to the whole idea of microblogging, watch this quick video explanation, called Twitter in Plain English.

Now that you get the premise, how do you start?

The first step is to start building your network. You can begin by adding people you know and testing out a few tweets, but the more quickly you have followers, the more exponentially the connection will spread. Search for users who are talking about things related to your industry and start following them. Many will follow you back instantly. Even if they don’t, you’re still visible on their followers list.

Market yourself.

Using Twitter for commercial purposes is still a somewhat nebulous proposal. But everyone on the site is promoting something, whether it’s their blogs, their company, or themselves (yes, people find jobs via Twitter), so the idea isn’t new.

The trick is to be a humble narcissist.

Your product is amazing. It will cure the ills of society without breaking the bank. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Not many in Twitterville will care if you try to sell them a marketing message. Give them something useful—a reason they would want to follow what you Tweet.

If you have a blog, it’s a great start. Every time a post is published, link to it in your Twitter feed. But don’t think that’s all the site is good for. Simply linking to your blog doesn’t mean people will follow it.

TALK to people.

• Direct message people who follow you thanking them and asking how you can help them.
• Link to other articles you think your network will find interesting, not just your own.
• “Retweet” others messages that you find interesting. To Retweet: copy their message, and at the beginning, type in their handle. For example, you find Bizmanualz’s message on this post. You type: “RT @bizmanualz Check out my blog post on Tweeting for your company!”
• “@ reply” to respond to a comment or question posted by a friend. For example, a friend asks for recommendations on a good dinner spot in St. Louis for the night. You type: “@sandi: Katie’s Pizza on Clayton is always good and is having a special tonight.”

In all of these cases, you provide value to your network. They appreciate you not just as a company shouting its message, but as a connection offering something interesting to say. When you do post the occasional: “Check out my website,” “We’re having a sale,” your network contacts, who now feel like they know you, will be more likely to visit.

Any questions? Feel free to comment and I’ll come back to check in and offer any more tips I find.