“How do I advertise on LinkedIn? Asked a business owner at a recent workshop.
While I answered that LinkedIn advertising probably isn’t the right path for many small businesses, one of my fellow presenters, Lara Solomon, disagreed and made the point LinkedIn is an important marketing tool.
There’s no doubt about that as a marketing, rather than an advertising tool, all online channels — including LinkedIn pages — are important to businesses as customers, suppliers and potential staff check the web before doing business with an organisation.
A good illustration of this was over the weekend when digital marketer, Raz Chorev, called out chicken chain Oporto’s for not training their staff on honouring Foursquare deals. Raz also made a point about censoring web comments which might be the topic of a future post, but really isn’t the issue here.
Raz’s comments appeared on Twitter, Facebook and on web searches. To their credit, Oporto responded quickly by isolating the damage, explaining their position and learning a lesson on letting their staff know about all the offers they post.
It isn’t just cranky customers posting on their own sites or any one of the thousands of review services such as Eatablity or Tripadvisor, we’re being judged on the comments of ex-employees, suppliers and even the quality and content of our own online utterings.
our brand is out there, on line, all the time.
A surly call centre, missed deliveries or billing mistakes all add up and damage our brands. Eventually, the massed weight of negative comments can overwhelm even the best, most expensive advertising campaign.
Our brands, both as individuals and our businesses are bigger than just marketing, we have to make sure we are consistently doing the right thing by our customers, suppliers and staff.
We’re in an era of accountablity which forces us to deliver on our promises. This is not a bad thing.