Bearhug consists of four main modules:

Pulse: This module gives your customers and your team real-time status information about your product or service. You can create “pulse updates” and sync them to your company Twitter account to keep everyone updated on issues, downtime, anything that affects their immediate satisfaction. Customers can subscribe to the updates via SMS — for quick notifications if time is of the essence — or via email or Twitter.

Answers: This module is where your consumer community can ask a question and then get an answer from both other members of the community who use your product or service and from your company. Using this module, you can moderate the questions and pick the community answer that best responds to the issue. You can also craft a company response. People can then access the best of both worlds in terms of information. This section builds a robust and interactive live FAQ for your customers.

First Rate: Customers post reviews — both good and bad — all over the web. Customers can post their reviews through this module and you can respond to feedback immediately, provide advice, moderate, publish and syndicate the reviews you want to feature.

Overheard: This module is Bearhug’s listening post. At presstime, it could pull in Twitter mentions of your company, product or service with more services pending including Yelp, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Through Overheard, you can immediately reply to mentions of your company or product on the web.

The Bearhug Dashboard gives you a global view and statistics of the activity about your company. You can also access metrics such as your company’s average response time, average rating and customer satisfaction. When you set up Bearhug, you can change the header text, language and messaging to display not only your branding but your brand personality. You can have Bearhug for each product you offer and turn modules on and off depending on your needs.

There’s also a sidebar widget to place a Bearhug support button on your web site.

Bearhug helps you embrace the organic feedback your customers are providing all over the web, while also bringing some management and metrics to the mix.

Bearhug’s currently in closed beta. Use this code to try it: webworkerdaily

What are you doing to reach out to and manage your customer community?

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The book is divided into sections on blogging; Twitter and microblogging; social networking; media sharing; social news and bookmarking; ratings and reviews; forums; and virtual worlds. In each section, Zarrella provides very short descriptions of leading web sites in the particular category, together with quick discussions of how they work, and how businesses could benefit from using them.

The book’s author dedicates it to his grandparents, which is appropriate, since this is the sort of book that I’d give to someone older and less computer-savvy. It sometimes gets a little technical for this audience, but the writing style is clear and friendly.

The book feels like a bit of a departure for O’Reilly Media (who kindly provided the book to me). I tend to think of O’Reilly as publishers of dense software and programming manuals. I was amused to note that the book is listed in O’Reilly’s catalog as “First Edition.” The book will need updating frequently if it’s to stay relevant — some of the screenshots are already out of date.

“The Social Media Marketing Book” is a little book. At 239 8″ x 6″ pages (in paperback or as an e-book), with lots of illustrations and white space, the content is frankly limited. But it’s well-organized, easy to understand, inviting to flip through,and approachable. I doubt that many WWD readers will learn anything new from this book, but it might be useful for lending to clients, family and friends.

How do you explain social media to clients?

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But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. However, If you focus on the marketing aspects of the networks, the time spent using them can consist of, as Meryl says, “zero-guilt activities.” Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools.

Join the active networks. There are literally thousands of social networks to choose from (digFoot lists over 3,700). But most are small, not very active, or of interest only in specific fields or geographic regions. I’ve spent the last month looking at many networks, and have decided that for me, it makes sense to focus on just four.

• LinkedIn. Often described as “Facebook for business,” LinkedIn combines a very large user base, excellent tools for finding connections, and lively discussion groups. Its system for making recommendations is very well-managed. It has so many features that its menu system can be obscure at times, but it’s well worth learning to navigate through the site.
• Facebook. The growth of this network is phenomenal — it’s claiming 700,000 new users every day! Even six months ago, most of my Facebook friends were under 30. Now, even we in the older generation have discovered it: I now have almost as many Facebook friends as I do LinkedIn connections, even though I joined LinkedIn several months before Facebook. Facebook is still a much more informal place than LinkedIn, but it’s becoming a valuable business tool as Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups (see below) evolve.
• Twitter. Technically, Twitter isn’t a social network, but it can be great for business communication and networking with customers, colleagues and friends. Facebook is highlighting its status update functionality to make it more “Twitterish,” so we’ll see how the two services compete.
• Yelp. This review site is new on my radar, but so far, I’m impressed with how active it is (at least in my part of the world). Now that it has a function allowing businesses to provide details of their services, it may become a very useful marketing tool, especially since it is now integrating a way to share reviews on Facebook. It is geographically based, however, and home workers may not want to provide a public street address.

Create pages for your business on LinkedIn, Facebook and Yelp. You may also want to create a Twitter account for your business that is separate from your personal account.

Join groups within the social networks where people you know are likely to hang out. In my opinion, the reason that LinkedIn and Facebook haven’t become unmanageable as they’ve gotten bigger, is that they’ve encouraged the development of small groups where people can talk about shared interests. Increase your credibility and visibility by using your professional expertise to add to these discussions.

Post frequently, but judiciously. Meryl’s comments about Twitter overload applies to the social networks as well. I’ll also add that services allowing one to post simultaneously to multiple networks, such as Ping.fm, are great, but should be used carefully. The networks have different audience demographics, and this should be kept in mind when you’re deciding what and where to post.

Use the networks’ automated tools for finding people you know. The networks can, with your permission, review your address book and see who you know who’s already on their network. They also have a “people you may know” function that recommends possible contacts. LinkedIn’s system has worked well for me; Facebook’s seems to be less accurate. The recommendations presented to you are based on background data (schools attended, former jobs) you provide to the networks, so it’s worth the time to provide complete information in your profiles — assuming you are comfortable with their privacy policies.

Use RSS feeds to follow what the members of your network are doing. The folks who run the social networks want you to visit their web sites, of course, but I find it more convenient to follow the activity of my connections through an RSS reader.

Add your Facebook instant message account to your IM program. Facebook’s instant message system can be added to multi-protocol IM programs. On my Mac, I prefer Adium; the PC users in my company like Pidgin or Digsby.

Use privacy settings to minimize email notifications. For Facebook, the AllFacebook blog has an excellent privacy primer; note, though, that Facebook is in the process of updating its privacy settings. And check out PC World’s discussion of privacy settings for LinkedIn. You’ll want to use these settings to control how and when the social networks email you. I find that since I follow the networks’ RSS feeds, I can turn off most of their emails.

It’s exciting to watch as the social media landscape changes every day. In the near future, it’s likely that some social networks will become important business tools, while others will fade away. In the meantime, we can learn how best to use these tools to increase the success of our endeavors.

What techniques do you use to manage social networks effectively?

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Now, I’m not famous, so I doubt that any news about me would cause a spike in Internet traffic, or get me invited to appear on “The Colbert Report.” But recent events made me realize that I still needed to have a plan in place to be able to respond to news (both real and false) posted online about me. Here’s what I came up with.

• Be prepared to respond instantly. The speed with which people heard about Jackson’s death was amazing. A friend of mine who happens to be a radio announcer smugly announced on his Facebook status that he was able to broadcast the news before CNN did. So if someone posts information about you, even (or especially!) if it’s not correct, there’s no time to waste. You must comment immediately, even if it’s a bare-bones “that’s wrong, more later.”
• Make sure that someone else has access to your accounts in case you aren’t available to post.
• Remember that the social networks are connected. If someone is talking about you on Twitter, the same comments are probably being made on Facebook, and other places as well. Check, and be ready to respond accordingly.
• Use Twitter and social network updates as backups to your usual means of communication. Recently, a much-hyped new web site found that it couldn’t cope with the traffic, so it put up a “down for maintenance” notice, complete with a “meanwhile, follow us on Twitter” recommendation. It was able to post updates on Twitter when its own site was overstretched.
• Don’t rely on just one site, or just one medium, to get the word out. My customers know that they can get the latest info on my web site, a backup web site on a leased server in another state, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and by pre-recorded phone message. I’m also experimenting with sites like Get Satisfaction and Yelp as backup information sources.

I hope that I never have to implement my emergency plans. But it’s a comfort to know that I’ll be ready if someone posts a “did you hear the news…?” message about me or my business.

How have you prepared to respond to news and rumors about you?

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