How to Communicate with Social Media

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Communicating Socially: The Wave of the Future? If you’re reading this post, the first thing you may start to wonder is “I bet this post is about using some sort of social media management console”. Applications such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Seesmic and others may come to mind. That assumption is natural, and there’s nothing wrong with it. However, I’ve already covered SMM’s thoroughly in other posts. What I’m about to demonstrate is where I personally think social media becomes the catalyst for something far greater. While many of you may be familiar with chat rooms and instant messenger applications, many maintain the impression that they are impractical to use in a business environment because they require the end user to download software in order to engage the end-user. It may also be somewhat confusing as to which application to choose, should you decide to use one. There are a wide variety of website and applications that provide instant messaging. Among the more popular include Skype, AIM, Yahoo, Facebook and Myspace. Meebo Image Source That’s where the all-in-one instant messaging platform Meebo comes into play. Meebo gives the end-user (you) the ability to consolidate buddy lists from all major platforms into one web-based console (even Facebook!).  Ok, now it’s time for a real-world scenario. You’ve added Facebook, AIM, and Yahoo to the service, and you can see all of your buddies in one place. Great! However, there’s still no “social” aspect to this. It’s also not very practical from a business standpoint. That’s where the MeeboMe chat widget takes over.  With the MeeboMe chat widget, you can easily embed a module into almost any website, blog, or HTML page and chat with your viewers. All of your web viewers are temporarily added to your Meebo buddy list for the duration of their time on a web page that has the widget. This is a great way to have one-on-one conversations with your viewers, provide support, consultations and so on. *be sure to check out the Meebo Bar for full website integration! But the fun doesn’t stop there folks! We’re just getting started. Taking conversation to the next level is the ever-so-popular chat room. Made famous by AOL and other early platform-based web providers, the chat room quickly became used, abused and then obsolete in the eyes of internet users. In the business environment, it can be hard to conceive a means to utilize the chat room effectively. Well luckily the advent of technology has blessed us with yet another golden nugget. TinyChat Image Source TinyChat by itself may seem a little “cartoonish” and playful at first. In fact, that was my exact impression the first time I came across the website and tried out their service. I then dismissed it as a viable communication tool (for business use) and never returned! Only within a few hours of writing this post did I truly discover how to effectively use it. We’ll get into that shortly, but first let’s go over TinyChat’s features. TinyChat allows an individual who signs up for the free service (administrator) to create a profile, create a chat room, and the ability to customize a wide variety of features. The privacy editor gives the administrator a great deal of flexibility, which makes it significantly more attractive to professionals. One feature that really grabbed my attention was the fact that you can assign multiple moderators to a single chat room. Imagine an entire team of customer support reps all moderating a single chat room and being able to individually or collectively provide support to website viewers! TinyChat wouldn’t be much of a breakthrough if it were limited to basic text chatting. When I said “golden nugget”, I really meant it! Listed below is a quick summary of the features you’ll find within TinyChat. Administrator: Ignore or Ban users Administrator: End a users live camera session Administrator: Private message room members Administrator: Share a whiteboard with viewers Administrator: Share a document with viewers All: Live Multi-Person Audio & Video Conferencing All: Broadcast YouTube videos as a video source All: Broadcast computer desktop as a video source The concerns for the instant messaging services also apply to public chat rooms. It is not a popular practice to force your viewers to download, install or register for any services to talk with you. Luckily, TinyChat paid attention to to this fact and made it extremely easy for website viewers to connect. There are three (3) options to join a chat room. Connect with Twitter - Connects you to the chat using your Twitter username Connect with Facebook - Connects you to the chat using your Facebook name Enter in a username - No connection required, just enter in your handle and join! The first two options make it easy for the social media savvy viewer to join your room. In a business environment however, it is not a good practice to assume or require that your viewers maintain membership with either service (although Facebook does have over 500 million members). That’s why the third option is quite appealing. A viewer can simply enter in their name or a generic “handle” and join the room. Now of course I don’t expect you to simply take my word that Meebo and TinyChat are viable business solutions. That’s why I went one step further. I installed both applications and came up with a basic workflow that I believe would be fairly simple to recreate for yourself or your company. 1. Determine Where You Want To Send Your Viewers It is best to first determine which type of chat you want to offer your viewers. Both the public and private chat may not be appropriate for one type of website viewer. For instance, with healthcare it would be highly inappropriate to discuss health issues in a public chat room. Also, if you were discussing a clients account, pricing or other financial issues, Meebo would be a much better option. 2. Link To Chat Rooms With A Simple Call-To-Action After spending a little time in an image editor today, I created a simple image to direct my viewers to the chat room page (see end of article). For demonstration purposes, I created an intermediary page that houses both chat room options (Meebo and TinyChat).  Give it a test run and let me know what you think. Do you use currently use any other chat applications that work for your clients? What barriers have you discovered when working with them?  Related Articles: The Ultimate Buddy List: Access Facebook and MySpace IM on Meebo 20 Great Widgets to Enhance Your Tumblr Blog Read more at chicagodesign.tumblr.com

 

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