Tag Archives: Sam Michelson

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Want to reduce client churn? Here’s how we do it!

My firm Five Blocks offers digital reputation management services and often our clients engage us as one would an exterminator or a locksmith – to help them solve a very specific measurable problem.

In order to retain our clients far beyond the original reason they hired us we employ the following tactics.

1) HOLISTIC APPROACH: We reframe the issue as a symptom rather than a cause. Meaning that while we can provide some relief for your immediate need, you need a more complete long term solution to address the underlying causes. This same strategy could make sense for other businesses where you can both address a short-term need but also help the client adopt a “lifestyle change” in their business around your area of expertise.

2) PROVIDE UNIQUE ADDICTIVE DELIVERABLES :  For example, unique insightful analysis that is easily understood and helps communicate successes within their own organization. One of our clients is a large bank and we have created a colorful weekly report of their online reputation that is then distributed widely within relevant parts of the organization. If the company moved to another vendor they would lose this popular report which highlights the work our contacts are accomplishing for their firm.

3) EDUCATE YOUR CLIENT: Our field, like many others, is constantly evolving and there are new opportunities and threats emerging all the time. We use a portion of our regular calls and reports for education: to share the latest opportunities, trends, and threats related to our work. When we have asked our clients for feedback they tell us that this part of our report is consistently insightful – and we feel this is an additional reason that clients stick with us for so long.

4) DEVELOP GREAT RELATIONSHIPS: We encourage our account team to develop friendly relationships and to support our clients even in areas that are beyond the scope of our agreements. When we do decide to move an account director off of an account we usually do so by introducing someone new and leaving the original account team in the loop and copied on emails for several months. In this way we ensure very smooth handoffs.

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Sphinncon Israel 2010

Sphinncon SMX Jerusalem 2010
This past Sunday afternoon Barry Schwartz hosted a mini-SMX in Jerusalem, Israel. Vanessa Fox joined him from the US as well. A short, relaxed version of SMX. Nice event – loved that it was so close to our office! It was good seeing my friends and colleagues from various places in Israel who made their way through the mountains to Jerusalem on what turned out to be a beautiful springlike day!

I spoke about Reputation Management Pitfalls and I will share the main points.
Note: when I say reputation management I mean getting negative results for your keyword out of the top 10 in Google.
1) Understand what your client really wants – it’s not always what they tell you at first. Dig deeper.
2) The goal is to “own” the top ten in Google and other search engines by working with Google – create and promote sites full of relevant content and get authoritative and/or topic-relevant links.
3) Don’t confuse Rep Management with SEO – it’s not a good idea to overdo the linking process – you will end up making your job more difficult – you will need to compete with yourself to move more sites into the top ten.

I will post the presentation on Slideshare soon.

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Explaining Twitter to a Newbie…

tweetbird2Until recently I believed that Twitter was a very odd pastime for people who were narcissistic or lonely. That was until my friend Kelli Brown who’s a Twitter expert gave me a few tips. The truth is that I already believed there might be some value in Twitter a year ago – that’s when I started my first twitter account, on the advice of my friend Mayer Reich at RankAbove. At that time I took a very popular website that had a lot of updates on a daily basis, but did not have a twitter account. I made a twitter account with their name and then used TwitterFeed to automatically feed updates from the sites RSS directly to the twitter account. That was about a a year ago – now I have over 45,000 followers. Seriously. I haven’t made any money from this yet – well maybe $20 from ad clicks… By the way – I get tens of messages daily from this account and I don’t exactly know what to do. I suspect that the company itself probably wants to control the twitter account that I created for them. The problem is that if they try to contact me via a direct message I won’t read it because I have hundreds of messages waiting to be read, oh well….

Anyway, Fast forward to now. This is what I want  to say:

I divide the Twitter experience into two parts:

– Friends and Followers

– Realtime information

In the realm of Friends and Followers I can only make sense of people who are careful about who they follow and keep their group of “friends” very relevant to them. In this realm I see Twitter as a way  to listen  in to what your circle of friends is saying – a little like being on an email list where people share links and short thoughts – but with more latitude.

As far as Realtime Information – this is where I see the real value. Google is no doubt a great search engine, but Twitter adds 2 very important things that Google misses out (so far).

  1. Real People
  2. Right Now

Google tells you what websites say, it includes some news and blogs and even shopping, but its not “regular people” who don’t have a website or a blog. Google is really fast – we have seen them cache pages in a minute or so, but for most searches – the results on Google seem to be months old.

Why do we care?

Say you wanted to take a vacation to Italy – if you search on Google you will see tour companies and official sites. Try searching on Twitter. Now you see tweets about renting a houseboat in Venice, staying at a cottage, etc. Twitter gets you past the corporate sites and down to real people. Even when you end up on a corporate site via Twitter, your chances of having a real person to answer questions is very high.

So, for me, Twitter is a reflection of what real people are saying right now.

Now imagine interacting with real people, right now – you can ask them questions – make them offers – communicate with them. And they opt in to your conversation, either by following you or by searching a term that you tweeted about.

Think about it…

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Getting Started

hyperIt’s been seven years since I started doing business online – so I decided to start a blog.

I plan to share my insights and funny stories about:

  • Working in the online environment
  • What I am learning about people and about myself
  • Experiences I have had that may help you in your work
  • Anything else I want to tell the world