Easy to Set Up

Nimble Social CRM is easy to get set up. You simply register, fill out the on-screen form, tell it what accounts you want to link to and then Nimble does the rest. Currently you can link to Google accounts, IMAP e-mail accounts, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages and LinkedIn. We particularly liked the fact that you can connect to a Facebook page without having to connect to a Facebook profile because this will suit small businesses that have used personal Facebook profiles to manage their business Facebook page.

You can also link to a Google Calendar so that your events show up in Nimble and tasks you set in Nimble will appear on your Google Calendar. Again, we liked that fact that you can select an individual Google Calendar category to sync.

When Nimble pulls in the contacts from your various networks, there were no duplicates; although we weren’t pulling in a huge number of contacts, we still found this impressive. You can also view your contacts by the company that they work for. Think of the company name as being another way of grouping contacts. We had a couple of duplicates to clean up, but this was where LinkedIn contacts had used a slightly different company name so it’s by no means a limitation of Nimble. Although grouping by company may seem like a simply concept, in CRM terms it can be very helpful when you can’t quite remember where you know that person from.

Discover more ways to Connect

When you view a company or person in Nimble, it suggests Social Profile Matches. This is a great feature because it helps you to find more ways to connect with your customers. Rather than having to search on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, Nimble does the searching for you.

There is an area we feel Nimble could be even better. When we went through our contacts in Nimble adding additional social network connections to these contacts, we assumed that we would be making an actual connection on the social network itself. For example, if I looked at Joe Blogs’ in my contacts and then added his suggested Twitter profile, I would assume I would then be following him on Twitter. Unfortunately this is not the case and you would have to go to Twitter and add them manually. This might not be a big deal if you live in Nimble, but most people we know access their social networks in a variety of ways so we think two way syncing is important.

All of your messages in one Inbox

Nimble handles messages beautifully. You have a single inbox that contains your e-mails and messages from the various social networks. An icon next to each message shows you which network the message is from. The senders name appears as a hyperlink if that person is in your contacts, so you can go to their profile quickly if you want more information before responding. Likewise, if you are viewing a contact then you can see a history of your messages with that contact from all of your networks.

You can also see the social stream for each contact, with their latest status updates. These features make it very easy to keep track of important messages and to build a rapport with your customers.

Keep track of your Tasks and Log Activity

The ‘Activities’ section may look like a simple task list and calendar, but the simplicity is the strength here. We really like the fact that from a message you have an option to assign a task, which then appears on the list of activities along with events in the calendar. From contacts you can also add events with a few clicks that will sync with your Google calendar.

We were a little disappointed that the tasks don’t sync back to Google. It again comes back to the fact that you are unlikely to always access the information from Nimble; for example, out on the road you may look at your Google calendar / tasks on a mobile device. Hopefully this is an area that they will develop.

When viewing contacts you can also log other activity (i.e. make notes that may be relevant in the future), which is a standard feature of CRM applications.

Areas For Development

After using Nimble Social CRM for a week we feel that the synchronisation issues are the main areas that we hope Nimble will improve. For example, contacts don’t automatically sync if you add a new contact in Google; instead you have to manually import new / updated contacts; unfortunately we were not able to get this feature to work due to an error on our account. When we updated contacts in Nimble, then we couldn’t find a way of pushing these changes through to Google or to any social networks.

Essentially, at the moment the flow of data is one way. Let us not forget that Nimble does a great job of pulling all this information together into one place to help you manage those customer relationships. In the future though, we hope Nimble will develop the app to push data back the other way so that Nimble Social CRM truly synchronises with your business’ social network.

The Verdict on Nimble Social CRM

While there are some areas for development, we think this is a very promising CRM application. The company is very proactive and contacted us after our initial tweets to see if they could assist with the trial. At the moment we feel it is best suited to smaller businesses that have fewer contacts to manage. Once the areas of development have been addressed then it will stand in good stead to meet the needs of larger businesses too. From what we have read in Nimble’s support forum, an Android and Ipad app is on the way, as is 2 way contact synchronisation with Google; these features along with two way syncing with social networks will make this a killer CRM application.

The company seems to be very proactive and is regularly adding features so we will definitely be watching this space. If Nimble develops the way we believe it will, it will be a winner.

As the video explains, it’s a piece of US legislation that if passed will allow sites to be blocked if they contain material that infringes on intellectual property rights, contains links to such sites or is consider Rogue.

But this is US legislation, how will it affect me and my business in the UK?

While SOPA may not affect you directly, consider how many sites you rely on that are owned by US companies. For most sites, the majority of traffic comes from Google (a US company). If the SOPA legislation is passed and a complaint is made against your site then it could be blocked from viewing to anyone in the US and dropped from the Google rankings. Likewise, if you use Paypal and Google Checkout to process payments, these financial services would no longer be provided to your website. You should consider other ways that you might be affected.

Is SOPA likely to go ahead?

Well, as the video says, there are most powers that be that are in support of the legislation. However, it is worth considering that the full powers that the legislation grants may not be used in the way that people are concerned about. That is not that say that we agree with the legislation, but website and business owners should consider the likelihood of any risks.

What’s the problem, protecting intellectual property and preventing piracy is a good thing…right?

We absolutely agree with protecting intellectual property and preventing piracy; this is not the point of contention that has caused the protests. The concerns are that the SOPA is a very broad piece of legislation that could potentially be misused. One of the big arguments is that competitors could make complaints just to get competitor sites take down. There are also serious concerns that innocent sites could suffer because of any link with a ‘rogue’ website (i.e. guilt by association).

What will happen next?

The legislation will be the subject of continued debate and so we don’t know which way it will go yet. We will be monitoring updates to see how things develop and paying particular attention to the potential impacts on UK businesses.

At the moment you can’t auto post to Google Plus

It is unfortunate, but currently Google Plus posts only integrate in one direction. If you post things on Google Plus then these posts can be pushed to Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, there is currently no work to push posts from other social media platforms to Google Plus.

This is frustrating for many because they have blogs that auto post links to their new articles on Facebook and Twitter, but the same efficient way of announcing new articles is not yet available on Google Plus.

Why can’t I auto post to Google Plus?

There are various articles on the net that explain that Google haven’t released the Application Programme Integration (API) that allows developers to create the plugin to do this. Some of these posts have been updated to announce the release of the API and yet there are still no plugins available. The reason is because Google have released a Google+ API but it is read-only (hence posts only go one way).

I saw a plugin for WordPress called Google Plus Poster. Won’t that work?

We assume you have seen this Google Plus Poster plugin for WordPress. We haven’t purchased it but we did watch the video on YouTube and read the forum and it appears to be a work around that sends you post to Google Plus via a mobile SMS account. We reached this conclusion because it is only available in the US / India (probably because of the SMS Gateway they are using) and because on the Youtube video the example shows ‘SMS’ above the update in Google Plus. It’s great that they’ve found a work around, but if you’re in the UK you’re going to be stuck.

How how do I make use of Google+ efficiently?

If you are already pretty well integrated (e.g. your blog posts automatically get posted to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) then you might consider that updating Google+ with a link to your article manually; because you are already very efficient at managing your social media presence then you may be able to afford the extra seconds it takes to post to Google+. Dare we say it, but this may be more efficient than spending hours looking for a solution to automate the process!

If you haven’t integrated your social media platforms yet, then you could consider using Google+ as your master platform to push updates to Twitter and Facebook. If it’s an option you want to investigate further then checkout How to Connect Google+ to Twitter and Facebook

Will Google+ ever allow me to auto post?

The first release of the Google API was only in September 2011. We would be surprised if they don’t eventually open the API up to allow integration in both directions. It may be that they are developing the API or it may be that they are holding the feature back to encourage people to actually login to Google+. Either way, we hope they will map the necessary API available to developers in the future.

If we assume that the goal is to service your customer, then social media is a tool that can be used to acquire or retain customers; in order to achieve this it is logical to think that you would want to push web traffic towards the point of sale. So why would a company push traffic away from them own website towards their social media sites? As the video shows, there a school of thought that this is the wrong strategy.

It a very valid point that some social media sites have fallen by the way side; when things are booming (like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) it’s hard to imagine that anything could replace them. I wonder if people used to have the same thoughts about mySpace? In terms of where you direct traffic, we have pondered a few reasons why an organisation might want to divert traffic away from the main website and towards their social media sites:

Community and Advocates

The way you use social media creates a strong sense of community that is more likely to lead to the acquisition and retention of customers. For example, the community may be advocates of your product or service.

Growing Community

Perhaps the goal is not sales but rather to grow the interest in your brand by building and growing the community; this certainly seemed to be the case in one of the cases we say this week where brand awareness was the clear goal.

Lack of Strategy

In some cases it seems apparent that there is a lack of coordination between marketing tactics. In the absence of a central marketing plan that includes a social media strategy, individual groups developed social media sites with their own agendas, each thinking it important to drive traffic to their site. The result seems to be an internal conflict where each site competes for traffic without there being a defined final destination for the visitors, they merely get bounced around from site to site.

Take your visitors on a journey.

We believe that whichever view you agree with, it is important to plan the journey of your visitors, identifying a destination for your target audience and identifying the different routes they could take. You may decide that all your social media pages should drive traffic to your main website. You may decide that your Twitter account will drive traffic to your blogspot and the to your website. Whatever you decide, it should be a clear plan with a clear objective. If you don’t know where your visitors should end up, how on earth are the supposed to know?

There’s no shortcut!

This video is great because it sums up why you won’t make a living out of social media, you will make a living out of your product or service that you promote using social media.

This video also highlights the importance of a good solid social media strategy. We often hear “I need to set up a Facebook page” or “How do I use Twitter, because I need to start using it”, to which we often ask Why? and get the response “We need to be on the bandwagon, all of our competitors are on there”. Oh dear (sigh). What businesses need to realise is that:

• You will not gain a competitive advantage by copying your competitors marketing tactics, you will always be a step behind.
• Without an objective, how will you know if the time and money you invest in social media has been worthwhile? You won’t!
• You must have a goal that social media can help you achieve.

It’s like going back to the days when people used hit counters on their website to see how many visitors they had and used that to measure how successful there site was. Then when e-commerce came along we realised that successful e-commerce sites were not necessarily the sites with the most visitors, but the sites that converted the most visitors into sales. Some people seem to have slipped back into thinking that having the most tweets or the most Facebook ‘Likes’ means they’ve done really well, when actually they should also be looking at how many of those converted into sales; only then can you know the return on your investment in social media. Before you tell me social media is free, think about how many hours you spend promoting your business through social media and multiply this by your hourly rate; this gives you an idea of how much you need to make from social media to cover your costs.

I’ve thought about it, and my business really would benefit from social media, but how do I use social media efficiently.

Good, so you have a goal and a clear plan of how social media can help you to achieve that goal. Using social media efficiently is a very sensible question, because for those that realise that their time is money, they will want to use their time on social networks efficiently and more time actually making money.

You may have seen our previous post called ‘Benefit from social media without having to maintain profiles’ where we explained how you can benefit from social media by relying on others spreading the word for you over the social networks. With a bit of extra effort, it is possible to create profiles on social media sites that maintain themselves with minimal effort. So, what exactly do I mean by this?

Let’s say you run an e-commerce website that sells garden furniture and you want to increase the traffic to your website. Your website consists of an online catalogue of products and a blog where you write gardening related articles and review products. Many of your customers use Facebook and Twitter so these are good channels to communicate with them. Here’s the trick, you don’t want to be writing things more than once! This is what steals so much time on social media sites.

Many websites will support plugins or modules that allow you to automatically post updates about new content and changes to your website to Facebook pages and Twitter. All of a sudden, you are using two social media channels and still only maintaining your website. Arguably, you are also spending the time on the valuable task of creating the content that will attract people to your site.

Social Media Aggregation

Aggregation is key! You know how you can get apps that allow you to read all of your Facebook and Twitter updates in once place? Well just think of it being like that in reverse, with a single status update going to all of your relevant social media channels.

The downside is that you are going to have to spend a bit more time planning and enlist the help of someone with the technical expertise to do it; this will be time well spent to avoid becoming burnt out as a result of social media overload.

This year has certainly seen many businesses getting smarter about the way they use social media. We hope that more companies will move away from ‘push communication’ via social media and more towards campaigns that go viral and ‘pull’ customers in. Companies that use mass marketing techniques through social media channels and spam everyone with their latest promotions are going to quickly fall behind the social media savvy companies.

The video also highlighted a few examples of marketing ideas that have gone viral and create a diverse brand image; these are going to be key to successful strategies for winning the social media marketing battles of 2012. Provide something interesting, engaging or useful and the social networks will spread the news for you.

So, take note, if you are posting status updates on all your social networks with your latest products and offers, you need to think again!

Evolution of the Web

As the video explain very well, we are currently experiencing Web 2.0 and we are reaching a point where Web 3.0 is starting to evolve. So what’s the difference and why does it matter I hear you cry. Essentially, Web 2.0 has been about communities, collaboration and sharing; everyone with access to a computer has been able to contribute to web content, unlike the days of Web 1.0 when only those with the technical knowledge could publish websites. Today, anyone can set up a blog in 5 minutes and start posting content to the web for others to share and comment on.

Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) is the natural evolution of the web to deal with a key problem that Web 2.0 has created. Now that everyone can contribute to the website, there has been an explosion in online information. Consider the amount of video on YouTube, the number of Blogs on Blogspot, the number of personal profiles on Facebook… There is a mountain of information at our fingertips and currently we use search engines to find the information we want. The focus of Web 3.0 will be relevance.

When you search for something using a search engine, like Google for example, it looks at keywords on the page, other sites that link to that page and a lot of other factors that they like to keep secret. But essentially, if you type in a phrase into Google and your friend down the road types in the same thing, you will get the same search results. Web 3.0 will revolutionise the way we find information because our interaction and experiences on the World Wide Web will be personalised.

When you search for something, Web 3.0 will find content that is relevant to what you are interested in. It may use information from your social network profiles, e-mail, previous searches, etc. We won’t know exactly until the semantic web evolves further, but we must consider that this will fundamentally change the way we find information, or should we say, how relevant information finds us.

Business Impact

There is clearly a business impact of Web 3.0. If you business is investing time and significant amounts of money into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), will it be of any value when Web 3.0 becomes established. The current techniques of targeting keywords, building inbound links to your site and optimising pages will become far less important in Web 3.0. The point of semantics is that Web 3.0 will find content based on the ‘meaning’ and ‘relevance’ to the individual.

While we don’t know exactly what the future of online marketing will look like, some have suggested that SEO as we know it is dead; some have suggested that outbound marketing will be less important because it will be less effective. We can speculate as much as we please, but knowing what to do now is perhaps the main concern for web site owners.

It’s probably too soon to pull the plug on any SEO work you’re doing, but it’s definitely not too soon to be reading up and keeping abreast of Web 3.0. If the history of the evolution of the web tells us anything, it’s that the evolution is continual and gradual. Don’t let Web 3.0 sneak up on you and find out that your competitors have surpassed you will new ways of reaching their customers using more effectively marketing strategies; have a plan to review the value added to your business through e-marketing and be on the look out for the future developments that we know are coming.

This video got me thinking about it more and it makes a good point that we use Google for so many other things that the power to integrate and share aspects of our online lives should be far easier with Google. Social networking is really just about online interactions around information that we post about ourselves to the Internet, and let’s face it, Google is pretty darn good at managing information!

I wonder whether some people may be put off of entrusting their entire online identity to one company. There are those that get upset by the way that Facebook exploits our information for marketing purposes, so what will those people make of a company that can do that and also link it to information they have about us from all the other Google services we use? The Big Brother debate is an old one and for many people, the benefits of what they can do with social media outweighs the risks / consequences.

I think the most interesting point is that people may not make a choice to move onto Google+, it is more likely to just happen because they want to take advantage of a particular function. It may be that someone where you work decides to use Google+ and Google Docs to set up a group to collaborate on a project; that’s just one of the many ways that people will get sucked in.

The fact that Google+ reached 10 million users in the first 16 days (compared to 780 days for Twitter and 852 days for Facebook to achieve the same) is obviously impressive. I think we still have to watch this space because registered users and active users are two very different things. It’s certainly going to be an interesting year for social networking.

“There is no such thing as viral marketing online!”

I will next forget running a seminar on e-marketing where we were comparing traditional marketing methods with e-marketing methods. When I asked what the equivilant on viral marketing was online I got one response “There is no such thing as viral marketing online!” I was surprised to get such a definitive answer, but it sparked a good debate in the seminar.

To say that viral marketing online doesn’t exist is clearly wrong! The ability for internet users to share information, post reviews and make comments is greater than ever. Social networks means that viral marketing is massive online and in many ways bigger than in traditional marketing. Social networks allow us to maintain connections with a vast number of people, more than most of us maintain in the real world. For example, you find a brilliant product and you might tell a few friends and they tell their friends, etc. whereas to you can share the new with hundreds of Facebook friends or Twitter followers in a single click, and so it continues on a larger scale.

Share Links with Social Media

So exactly how do you and your business benefit from social media? How can you promote yourself through social media without a profile on Facebook or Twitter? The answer is simple…you give visitors to your website the ability to share links via social media. We’ve all seen the buttons appearing all over the web to ‘Like this’ or ‘Tweet this’ and the social media icons that allow you to post a webpage to any number of social networking sites. By adding these buttons to your web site you allow your website content to be shared over social networks. You don’t have to be on the social networks for other people to share links to your web pages.

In many ways we prefer this marketing technique. Businesses that tweet pointless updates, constantly post promotions on Facebook pages and generally bombard social networks often do more harm to customer relations than good; they have taken a two way communication tool and used it to promote and communicate one way. Thing about it, which is more powerful, a recommendation that comes from a company or from a friend? A company is likely to want to sell you something, a friend is likely pointing you in the direction of something you are interested in.

Content is King

The content of your website is crucial, because you have to have things on your website that people want to share. Blogs are often overlooked by businesses. Why? Because they are more time consuming to maintain that a list of random tweets and Facebook status’. However, blogs are more likely to attract people to your site and more likely to get shared on social networks if you right something of interest.

How do I add share links to my site?

There are various services that provide share link widgets and buttons. It really depends on how your site is created as to how you can add them to your site. We’d recommend you talk to your web site developer / maintainer to discuss the possibilities.