Hey its a new year and I am feeling really refreshed. The holidays were the worst ever for me as i was stuck in PH with my uncle and his kids and absolutely no activities and to make it worse on of the helps in the house decided that she had had enough and she was going to leave, so it was absolute hell for me. But in the midst of all of this boredom and house chores my heart was miraculously filled with joy on Christmas day, i was ecstatic, you might think i would be too old to just feel unfounded happiness but this was great. i woke up singing my favorite Christmas songs took a shower and went to church the mass just seemed so heavenly i loved it and it did fill my heart with joy. i had breakfast at bobbys before going home. i actually did not want to give a day to day account just an overview so i think i might be going over board now. Well new year came and it was time for resolutions so i tot what resolutions would i make this year, i tot about those i didn't make last year and decided that i should make some this year after some tot and brainstorming with my self i decided this year is my year More for me, i would do more just to make my self happy, always look nice, get my hair on point nails, eyes, but its gonna be my year MORE FOR ME!!

I know that sounds kinda selfish, but hey lemme live for me a little.

Finding my own sycamore

I meant to write about this about like 2 Sundays ago, after the sermon about Zacheus was read in the church. I proclaimed the second reading (6:30am) and that is always a cool experience for me. So in the sermon the priest asked us to find our own sycamore trees, just like the one Zach found just to see the face of Jesus. Your own tree could be the church you attend, the sacraments, our virgin mother, charity work, what ever it is that leads you to find the face of Jesus is your own sycamore tree. It dawned on me how much Zach or how hard it must have been for him to climb that tree. When we hear Zachus climbed a tree we often take it at face value. Okay a guy climbed a tree, so what? But thinking deeper it occurred to me how stupid the act must have been, he was the chief tax collector and a wealthy man(so in other words a big guy, i'll liken him to our present day politicians). He was short in statue, so am presuming like all the other short guys I know he had an ego the size of a water melon, and still he did this thing that seems so stupid and degrading, climbing a tree. As a safety professional,"winks" I can not but tell you that his act was also very unsafe, there were so many hazards, what if the branch gave way(falling hazard), he had no harness or any other safety equipment(no PPE), what if he slipped(slip hazard), what if there were ants on the tree? He still went ahead and did this very unsafe act, he climbed a tree. What if Jesus passed another way or what if Jesus did not even looking up sef, I mean there were people all around him he could have easily passed by without looking up and thus his mission would have been in vain, but still he took the risk and he climbed the tree. Who knows how long he had to wait on the tree before Jesus passed hanging from a branch patiently waiting(it was definitely an uncomfortable wait), he didn't know how long it would take(my presumptions oh) still he did the silly thing and he climbed the tree. My lesson from this verse, a story I had heard all my life, year in year out, had never been so profound as it was today for me. It was clear that to seek the face of Jesus, you had to do that thing which was not very cool, maybe leave a hangout for evening mass, or spend longer hours in church, i also think it would most likely be different for everyone. we would have to darn all the consequences and do that thing which we feel is right, we would have to be patient, we would have to also be creative, we would have to know that shame did not have any part to play in this game. Go all out, find your own sycamore tree and climb it. Maybe Zach did not have to wait that long on his own, maybe we might have to. So exercise patience whilst on the tree. Am sure that Jesus would pass and Jesus would look up. The rewards were big for Zach, Jesus was his guest, that is big, the son of God in ordinary me's house, in my heart, that is big.The reward would definitely be big for us too. A tot occurred to me how about all the others who did not have to climb the tree after all there were those on the ground with Jesus, yeah that's true, and maybe he did touch all their life's and healed them, but it was only Zach that got the pleasure of having the Lord in his home. So big rewards for big risks I found my own tree, the catholic church is my own tree. Its actually quite an attractive tree as it is strong and sturdy, and has branches, strong branches all leading to the face of Jesus. The branches are not only the different parishes but also the sacraments, our mother, the saints, the holy Eucharist,it is hard to understand for those who do not know what all these things mean,but the beauty and peace the forgiveness of sins, its absolutly amazing. I have nothing against any other denomination(except the criminal ones) but i think this is just a richer bouquet, the other Christians hold on to the bible that's all they have, i feel sad for them sometimes cause they do not know what they are missing.

Find your customers and think like them

Finding our exact target audience was a  little bit difficult for Circuit Atlantic because I mean how do you find the target audience for a combination of amazon, bestbuy, carters, drugs.com? Too vast too wide, we carter for not just a particular sector of people but for a wide range, as the items we purchase also have a wide range as well. nonetheless we were able to narrow down our customers to users of the internet. Don't be alarmed there are not so many users of the internet in Nigeria.

Finding your customer is just the beginning, thinking like them is also essential. When sending out comments or information on any of the social media tools, its important you step out of the senders shoes and think like the receiver. Would this mail annoy me and provoke me to unsubscribing or is it something sweet that you can actually relate to and get value from reading it. So before you send out that email campaign, tweet or Facebook message see your self as the customer and make sure they would find it just as interesting as you did.

Our email campaigns prior to my taking over social media for Circuit Atlantic used to suck, as in literally suck  even me as a staff stopped opening them.  I can imagine how many people unsubscribed for lack of interest and the apparent disruption. We have upgraded now the emails campaings and have more beautiful looking messages that you would want to look at past 5secs. Our unsubscribe ration has reduced and more people are opening our emails. i didn't develop the new outlook oh!

I haven't been here in a while however I would put our Facebook likes (1761)and tweeter 160follwers just so we keep count of what we are doing

Listening

 The first topic I read was about mastering the art of listening. A lot of times on social media we are bombarded with different people sell or advocating for different things. Half of which you’re really not interested in. Some might manage to catch your interest, but ultimately most just end up pissing you off. That is not the kind of disruption you need to build a fan base.

Humans by nature would always like to feel heard or like some one is listening,  so it’s not really possible to over emphasis the act of listening to you customers. Before I embarked on my quest of becoming likeable, I would always just bombard our fans with items I felt would compel people to look at and hence like our page, never once prompting for feedback of any sort, our fan base grew but only organically. 1like here 1like there, one comment here one comment there, that sort of growth. It took a while for me to realize that I was just one person and what I might find compelling and attractive others might not, talk less of having the time to stop, like the page, read and put up a post. Nonetheless without any tact I continued posting my deals and selling my brand Circuit Atlantic. After learning the importance of listening I stop and asked fan to tell us what they really think about us

 "Today is Circuit Atlantic's Customer Appreciation Day!(actually every day is customer appreciation day for us here!). Tell us what you think about our services and how you think we can serve you better. And don't forget we loving listening to you!"

Those were my exact words, and this got people talking, not too many but some at least I got 3 comments which I promptly replied to( people only know you are listening when you reply), well not too bad for a start. Another thing with listening is that you have to be ready to hear the good, the bad and the ugly, because more likely than not you’ll get all 3. If you are good at what you do, the good comments should out weight the bad and ugly, if you get more bad comments than good may be you’re not yet ready for social media. 

After the few comments I received form my first exercise, I realized that I needed more people in my fan bases to enable me get more comments or at least likes for the questions or comments I put up so as to have more people see it. Simply put, the stories you see on your Facebook page whenever you visit are not the most recent stories, but the stories that have a lot of likes and engagement, of course the most recent also appear but those that people are talking about more and also have more like will stay longer on individual pages. So I learnt that from this first lesson to respond as quickly as possible to any comment received there’s a higher chance of engaging or starting a conversation when you reply to people this will keep you on keep higher up on their wall and thus more people have the opportunity to view and also respond to your post!

The cost of not listening could be huge, before taking this position, we already had an existing Facebook page and also Twitter accounts. I did a check on twitter checking all the times we had been mentioned and I was surprised to see that we had been mentioned quite a number of times; with no response. We hadn't tweeted or at least responded to the tweets even those that were direct questions for us to answer.  We may have lost customers in this process of not listen. If I were a customer or a potential customer and I asked a question and my question wasn't responded to I probably wouldn't shop/do business with the company.

Also listen in on your competition; in our case the only one worth listening to was BringitBay, I went through their Facebook page and saw nothing interesting, so I moved on to twitter they had a stronger following on twitter, also noticed that they had one of the leading tech blogs in the country do an article on them. This seemed to me like a minus, because for me from a customers stand point why would you pay to get a review? And only the positive parts of your business are highlighted I would probably look at them as being insincere. I would prefer a sincere review where they look for the short comings of your site as well as the positive parts. Customers would react a lot better to that as sincerity breeds trust, and what more does a business need like their customers trust! Also worth while might be listening in or searching for related subjects, for instance doing a twitter search for I want to buy a new dress or shoe for a clothing store, for us we could do a combination of I want to buy…

Plan of action; Ensure I get notification whenever anything is placed on my wall Facebook and twitter (on my phone) and respond immediately. Here in Nigeria people might not always be on the internet, so it is helpful when you can respond to comments almost immediately while they are still on their computers. There are also platforms where you can listen in on all your different social media(am not interested yet in that I could easily see all the notifications as am still on my way to an uncontrollable fan base). I think it would be helpful to indicate my current number of likes on Facebook (1466) and followers on twitter (120). So if you are a Social Media Expert Wannabe like me you may find extra ways which you can listen in, to find out what your customers are thinking or how exactly they feel about your products and services, listening without any doubt has its rewards.

In the begining!

I recently took a new job with a young start-up e-commerce company, and as with most start-ups you can very likely find yourself doing different things at different times. Don't get me wrong that was why I left my old job and started this new one. I craved the change; I want to be able to do something different, as opposed to preparing bills of quantities every day (my old job).

So now I have been given the responsibility of handling our Social Media Networks, an engineer by training, am thinking, oops what have I got myself into. And so I started first and foremost with the king of all social media, Facebook, my predecessor was a trained writer and wrote exceptionally well(big shoes to fill). While all through my 5 years in the university I have never had to write more than 250words, to explain whatever it is that the examiner had asked in the exam. And  now all of a sudden I have to write stuff to earn a living. Life hard oh!

Back to Facebook, for me I kept my eyes on the likes, I needed somehow to make those numbers go up. That would be a good measurement of the work I had been doing. I started out posting deals, which could possibly interest people and attract their attention to “like” the company page. By the way did I mention what the company does? They we (sounds better) are a procurement company; basically customers can place orders for items from the USA online through our web based application (pretty cool stuff, www.circuitatlantic.com) we handle the procurement and deliver to them in Nigeria. Back to the story, I still wasn't getting enough attention and our likes weren't exponentially increasing, it was just the organic increase of perhaps one like a day that we were getting. And so I equipped myself and started reading. Actually my boss (coolest boss ever), after I indicated interest in this aspect of the company (imagine browsing Facebook as your job) bought books to help me increase my knowledge base and also learn more about the various social media networks.

The First book I delved into was “Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen” (maybe because it was the smallest, also I had never been a book person!). I was also asked to write response papers for every topic I read. Where I would articulate what I have read, propose and application with respect to our business, present a report on the application, then form an opinion on the implication of what I have learnt, and we would then discuss topics to help internalize. What a way to learn!
Since I always wanted to start a blog since I got the Social Media job, I just wasn't sure what it should be on. If it was about the company, that would be even too boring for me to write. And like an epiphany this came to my mind I would write my response paper on the blog. It would not only make me enthusiastic to write, I would also have to write it periodically. Also others could read and critique my writing and also discuss the issues raised, there by learning in the process. I know a lot out there just fluke the whole social media network thing, not realizing the power of the social media and how it could make or mare your business. Am hoping this would be a learning point for others out there and also for me too!