ActiveRain Tutorials: March 2010

Handling Difficult Clients On The Phone

Have you ever had a phone call with someone like the gentlemant to the right?  No matter how wrong they may be, the only thing they want is for you to listen to them yell & scream and tell you how horrible you are.

While the days of text messaging & mobile phone apps seem to be at an all time high, some would argue that actual phone skills don't seem that big anymore. There are now mobile apps for just about anything you could possibly imagine. Everything from restaurant reviews, paying bills, and more can be done on the right types of phones. Even though these new apps & ideas are are streamlining the amount of time we may spend talking on a phone there are still times you will need to speak to an upset customer.

Proper phone skills are crucial to any type of business that exists. It is imperative that you handle angry clients properly when on the phone. If a person becomes displeased while on the phone with you, you just lost their business forever. Plus, they will probably then pick up the phone and call all their close friends to complain as well. You have now not only lost the business of that client, but also their entire sphere of connections.

That being said, here are 5 Tips to Handling Difficult Phone Calls with consumers.

Tip #1

When on the phone with an angry person, let them do the talking. Sometimes they just need to blow off steam and get what has been on their chest for the past week out in the open. If you begin cutting them off you will just increase their anger about the situation.

Tip #2

Don't Argue! No matter how wrong the person may be, if you begin challenging what they are saying and arguing with them on the phone, you will never make any progress at solving the problem. Instead you will just intensify the situation until they probably hang up on you never to be heard of again.

Tip #3

Show sincerity and concern. I think the age old saying "People don't care how much you know until the know how much you care" is key to problemsolving. They want you to realize that their problem is a major issue to them and that they don't just want you telling them what you are gonna do.

Tip #4

Don't Patronize! Don't behave towards someone in a way which is kind and friendly but nevertheless shows that you are being condescending. People hate that and can pick up on it almost instantly.

Tip #5

Lead them to the answer. My father tells me constantly that it is not always right to be right. When dealing with difficult people on the phone, if you can lead them to the answer and allow them to discover it on their own, it will make them feel better. You may have to eat a piece of humble pie when they tell you that they figured it out and you didn't, but at least they will end the call feeling good instead of upset and wanting to end the business relationship. Besides remember, it's not about you, it's about them.

I hope these 5 tips help increase your business. If there are other tips you use that work effectively, leave them here!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tudor/255272612/

One of the things that I have wanted to do for a long time was have some sort of event here in the Carolinas where people could come and learn the basics of social media and how to use it effectively for their business.  There are always all these great events like RainCamp & BarCamps all over the country, but the amount of stuff here in the Carolinas is normally very minimal.

UNTIL NOW!

I am excited to be holding a half day workshop on Understanding Social Media. If you are an individual, business, church, charity, or any other organization that would like to have a better understanding of how social media platforms can be used to increase income, increase growth, and the strategies that you should use to maximize your efforts on each network, then you want to attend this workshop.

Here are a few of the topics we will cover in detail:

*Having an Effective Website
*Fundamentals of Blogging
*Twitter 101
*Facebook Personal Profiles
*Facebook Pages for businesses & organizations
*Using Video Online Effectively

This is a completely free event being hosted at Beach Family Worship Center.  The address is 133 Highway 707 Connector, Myrtle Beach, SC 29588.  It is located next to the Socastee Library.  Get Directions.

Please register below:

So if you live in the southeast and want to learn more about how to use social media to increase your business I hope you will make the journey to Myrtle Beach to this event. If you have any questions about this event, please e-mail me or call 843-222-9402.

Since this Friday I am teaching a webinar for ActiveRain University titled Customizing Your ActiveRain Blog that it was time for me to share about the importance of building your brands across all social media platforms.  Instead of writing a 3,000 word novel to cover all of the different platforms that exist and tips to customizing each, I figured I would break this down into a series. 

The first network I want to talk about today is Customizing your Facebook Page.  But before I get into what to customize and how, I first want to share the difference between the three main categories Facebook offers. The first is a Facebook Profile.  A profile is your personal page on Facebook.  It is where you have "friends" and can connect with people on a personal level.  What many do not realize about these profiles is that Facebook frowns heavily on you doing any business on them.  In fact, section 4.2 of Facebook TOS says this: "You will not use your personal profile for commercial gain." Pretty self explanatory.

A Facebook Group is the second category of Facebook that I wanted to discuss.  These pages are limited to the number of members you can have.  Also, they normally require each person to be accepted into the group.  They also have several limitations to the customization end of things. So while these might be good idea, they have some major limitations when it comes to being effective for business.

The third Facebook category which I want to talk in detail about is Facebook Pages.  These are designed for businesses.  They allow many customizations and also unlimited number of fans.  Many times though, when I look at Facebook Pages, I see so many things that could use some improvement. 

Here are my 4 most important things to do when customizing a Facebook Page.

1.  Fill in the about me section on your main page.  Facebook pages have a small about me section on the main area of your page.  Make sure you fill this area in with a brief description of what the page is about.  The other thing that is good to do here is add a link to your website.  You can do so by just typing out the full URL to your site.

This is a quick and easy way to share a little bit of information about the purpose of your page and also your business.  Like I mentioned, keep this brief.  Don't try to get into a sales pitch here or you will lose the consumer before they even take the time to click to become a fan.

2.  Custom avatars-  Did you know that you can create your own custom avatars for your Facebook Page?  Instead of using a standard 200x200 photo, you can actually have something that is up to 540 pixels long!  One of the big advantages to the larger custom avatars is that they will stand out from your competition when someone is searching for pages to join.  If the logos for all the other pages are small and yours is over twice the size, you have a much better chance of them noticing you.  Here are a few ideas for other things to incorporate into your avatar.  You can add additional text, graphics, & colors to it.  While the links you add are not going to be able to be clicked, you can give people valuable information like a quick reference to your phone number, twitter account, etc.

Here are a few that I recently designed for clients.  You can see what I mean:

The key though to making these larger avatars is that you have to keep in mind the logo that will show up on your thumbnails on the wall.  So it is important that you use the correct spacing, sizing etc for your main logo/image. If not, you will end up with half of your head, or logo showing up on the thumbnails and that doesn't always look the greatest.  If you are graphically design challenged, I can help.

3. Integration of Blog- There are several ways to integrate your blog into your Facebook page.  While some work better than others, you have to go with the process you prefer.  I personally like mine coming in as an RSS feed through social RSS, but you can also use the notes function if you wish.  The key though is to feed in your blog information so that there is a steady stream of content other than just your regular wall posts.  One word of caution though, remember when you set up the RSS feed that it feeds everything posted to that domain.  So if you set it up & then place a blog post that is off topic or slightly offensive, it will be visible to your Facebook page as well.

4.  Custom Welcome Tab-  This is by far the most effective thing you can have on your Facebook page.  You can set this to be the tab that greets every single guest to your site.  That way they can get to know you immediately.  Our Facebook Page which was built by Mike Mueller, has a nice welcome video from myself & Jason Crouch that greets every single fan to our page.  We kept our video under a minute and just thank people for visiting & encourage them to become a fan.  In less than 10 days, it has been viewed 100 times! 

These custom tabs can also have all types of things added to them.  Including good keyword rich content, links to pages of your website, links to other services you offer.  If you know FBML, you can really do some awesome things on a page.  But, if you are like me and are not an expert on FBML (Facebook Markup Language) then I would HIGHLY recommend you contact Mike Mueller to build your page.  He has done over 200 of them & is really up to date on all the changes in specs to the pages.  That way you do not have someone build a great custom page for you to find out the next week that Facebook is making major changes to size allotments & other specs.  If you want a page, contact him here.  Also, because he likes me so much, he told me I can offer a 10% discount if you mention my name.  So tell him Jeremy sent you!

Take these 4 simple steps, place them into action, and you can really have one really awesome custom page that is branded to your business.  This means that if they find you on a website or on Facebook, it doesn't really matter because both sites look, feel & act in very similar manners. If you don't believe me, take a look at our website & Facebook page.  You will definitely see the correlation in our branding between the two.

If you want to learn more about how to customize your Facebook Page, feel free to contact me directly or register for our workshop on 3/17/10 at 2PM EST. Mike is going to teach you more on how to build awesome custom Facebook pages like ours!

Branding your image is one of the most important aspects of any business.  You need to have an image that depicts you and the business you are involved in.  Many sites require complex steps to customize a theme and make it the way you wish.  ActiveRain offers you a really great option on how to customize your blog to represent your image better.  Unfortunately, very few really master how to accomplish this.

Have you ever seen a blog on ActiveRain that looks like this?

I know I surely have.  While this type of theme might be acceptable on this network, it really doesn't convey a professional branding that you would wish to associate with your business.  On Friday March 19th at 11 AM EST (8 AM PST) I will be teaching at ActiveRain University on how to customize your your blog on ActiveRain.  This 1 hour webinar will cover the following:

• Creating a Custom Header that has Pizazz.
• Uploading a Header to your ActiveRain Blog & Outside Blog.
• Customizing your ActiveRain Background to compliment your header.

Now, in case you were wondering why ActiveRain chose me to teach this class, let me show you a few examples of headers I have created in the past for clients:

And here are a few more examples of member blogs that I have customized:

These are just a few customizations on ActiveRain that I have done for clients in the past.  In this webinar, I will show you step by step how to take your blog customizations to the next level.

To register for this class, visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/752157441.

7 Secrets to Facebook Page Success

I am sure by now we all know that Facebook is an absolute must for your business, but you may not understand why this is so important. Allow me to share a few statistics that might make it more obvious why everyone who is in business needs to have a Facebook page.

General Stats

• More than 400 million active users on Facebook
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month

Many though get confused by the personal profiles and Facebook Pages which are designated for business. If you weren't aware, Facebook frowns heavily on the use of a personal page for business purposes. In fact, I have heard of profiles being shut down because they were being used for the wrong purpose. A client of mine the other week ran into restrictions on his profile because it had too much business dealings taking place for their liking. They made it almost impossible to add friends, join a page, or even attend an event. The other thing with a personal page is that you are limited toonly 5,000 friends. Facebook pages allow you to have unlimited fans and talk about business as much as you wish. Because of these rules that are in place on Facebook, not only are more and more people joining daily, but so are businesses setting up a page is growing at astronomical rates.

Take a look at some of these stats on Facebook Pages:

• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

In a constant effort to provide the best content for our clients, 210 Consulting is bringing in one of the most proficient people on the planet about Facebook Fan Pages, Mike Mueller. Mike has created over 150 custom Facebook pages for clients and is constantly keeping abreast of any changes to Facebook. He has also traveled around the country teaching hundreds the basics of Facebook pages and how to use them successfully.

We are excited for Mike to join us for this FREE 60 minute webinar titled "7 Secrets to Facebook Success" on Tuesday, March 9th at 2PM EST.

To register for this free class, simply fill out the form below.  Seating is limited and is on a first come first serve basis. We hope to see you there!

As many of you are aware, I recently started a new job as community manager for a company called SmartHippo.  This company is focused on helping the consumer make the most informed decision when getting a mortgage by providing a free advice section where you can ask questions and receive responses from mortgage professionals.  The other great feature that SmartHippo offers to consumers is the ability to write reviews of a lender they used.  Consumers can write all about the good, the bad, & indifferent of the lender they used to help others understand how reliable, how pleasant and everything else about their transaction before making one of the biggest decisions of their life.

Since joining the team, one of my focuses was to create tools that will assist real estate agents with the process of getting a mortgage for their clients.  One way we have been able to achieve this goal is by the design of our newest release, the SmartHippo Mortgage Rates Widget.  This widget gives consumers an easy way to compare the rates of multiple lenders in their area.  They can simply enter a loan amount, a home value, and their zip code and instantly compare mortgage rates in their area.

How does it work?  The widget searches the rates database that SmartHippo has created of unbiased rates of lenders who share their information on the network.  Buyers can then simply see the list of rates, read lender reviews, and make an educated decision on who to get their loan through. 

Why would a real estate agent want to use this widget?  In the real estate industry agents are always hesitant to recommend any other businesses because if something goes wrong the client will inevitably come back and say "you recommended this person and now it all went wrong!" When you give the consumer a third party option where they can get the information on multiple sources with reviews from actual consumers who have used the company and expressed their opinions about the service they received.

So what does this look like? Take a look and tell me your thoughts:

Mortgage rates by

Get this widget

How do you get the widget installed on your blog or website?  It is actually really easy to do. Simply visit the Mortgage Rates Widget page on SmartHippo, and grab the code needed to install this widget.  The steps are really easy to do and this widget can be installed in less than 2 minutes time. Here is a simple video on how to install:

I hope this new widget is a benefit to you and you consumers!  Let me know what you think of it!