Send out your spies to find your customers in social media

May 14, 2010 by Stephanie

As a followup to his excellent post on finding your brands’ mass influencers, Jay Baer gives us four immediate ways to find out whether your customers are using social media. This is brilliant, really, as it takes “social media listening” way beyond the kind of passive listening that we do with tools like Radian 6 and Alterian, and into actionable listening to the people who are actually your customers.

The two easiest? First, if you want to know if your customers are on Twitter or Facebook, and you have their email addresses, Jay helps you sleuth it out. He admits it’s stalking – but it all seems fair game in this age of openness.

Second, in the category of “duh,” he says to simply ask your customers for their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account info any time you have an opportunity to collect data. I’d also suggest asking if your users are using Fourquare or Gowalla, and if they use their mobile phones for social networking. You may not get all these answers (don’t make them required fields), but hey, it can’t hurt to ask. Even if you can’t act on this information immediately, any bits of data you get now will serve your social media strategy later.

Jay is leading the way in how to think about merging “old school” online marketing activities like email marketing and database management with the new social paradigm. How is your company combining these efforts?

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