Sean Ferguson, who is a user of Yoono has just written a post about how we do social media. In the separate post “Building Community through Social Media” I explain, in depth, our social media strategy and process and how I focus my time each day connecting with users, offering support and growing our community. Separately I wanted to highlight some aspects of Sean’s post and offer my thoughts on his feedback.
Let me start by saying that Sean highlighted many of our best attributes for interacting with our online community. We’re grateful of his post and for having him as a user. You can read his post in its entirety here [LINK].
I’ve been a Yoono user for over a year and have always been happy with their service. However, it wasn’t until quite recently that I recognized their excellence in social media best practices. As is often the case, it all began with a simple tweet to a friend:
- @caitlinrain Yoono is an amazing Firefox addon. They just released a new version: http://bit.ly/oUFts
To my surprise, @Yoono retweeted me. While a nice gesture (albeit somewhat self-promotional), I didn’t think much of it at the time. When I recommended Yoono to my followers several months later, I received a personal thanks from their support team.
- IMHO, @Yoono is the best Firefox plugin for keeping afloat in the often turbulent social media sea. http://su.pr/2X6RdM
- @SeanWF well now. that’s an excellent reply. thank you very much for the support!
Not only was I given a very personable response but it was within five minutes of my tweet. I decided to take the opportunity to see what else Yoono was doing on Twitter. My experience was no outlier. @Yoono takes the time to retweet or thank everyone who mentions them. They address every question and concern with concision and care. They consistently link out to posts that review their extension. Far from robotic autoresponse, their tweets are obviously personally crafted.
Sean actually was a part of something I do with nearly every single mention of Yoono. I do remember this instance despite the fact that we see THOUSANDS of mentions of Yoono every single month. That’s no exaggeration, our mentions of Yoono increase significantly every month and we saw over 3000 in August alone.
I generally reply to everyone that mentions Yoono within half an hour and will re-tweet very positive content about us. I never ignore a negative tweet even if it’s full of curse words. I view it as my job to listen and note all feedback, positive or negative, and engage our users as much as possible. If you can’t at least see every mention of your company or product, then hire more people so you can. This is a very important thing that companies often miss – it’s free market and user research at a minimum and a chance to build a community if you do it right. There are at least two of us at Yoono doing this job daily.
Sean continues:
My interest piqued, I began to look further into Yoono’s use of social media. The foundation of Yoono’s efforts is their Community Support Forum powered by Get Satisfaction. Yoono team members are active (and quick!) in addressing every question, idea, and problem brought to their attention; often going above and beyond expectations.
Yes we are. I review every new post on our support forums. If it’s critical, an immediate response is issued and if it’s non-critical I never let 24 hours pass before a response is issued. It’s also a matter of organization and I keep the backend of our support system in tip-top shape and offer weekly reports of feature requests and bugs to our engineers based on public Facebook, Twitter & other online support channels.
Yoono is almost meticulously consistent as a quick glace at their Facebook page shows. The Yoono team often goes out of their way in responding to those who reach out to them. When I began writing this article, I requsted permission to use Yoono’s logo for this post. In less than 10 minutes, they replied.
Yes that was a very easy response and we are pleased you asked 
What can we learn from Yoono’s example that we can apply to our own business models? I think Yoono teaches us that in order to effectively engage social media we must:
- Act Quickly
- The internet moves faster than you can imagine. The cost of being left behind is high.
- Always Respond
- Never ignore someone who takes time to talk about you. That person could end up writing a blog post about you.
- Be Personal
- Social media is about being social (ie. human) even if the medium is technology-driven.
- Stay Consistent
It takes just a few clicks to find out everything there is to know about you. Make them count.
Yes these are great points about how we handle social media and public customer feedback. I’ve touched on these in my more lengthy blog post explaining Yoono’s strategy.
The Yoono Firefox Sidebar has been downloaded nearly 3 million times and reviewed
160161 times with an average rating of 5/5 stars. The extension has been reviewed on numerous blogs and notably featured on TechCrunch. Yoono’s Twitter and Facebook profiles each have over 1,000 followers/fans.
This is a great point but it also is the result of having a great product! The two go hand in hand and we strive for a product that exceeds our customer’s expectations paired with an excellent public social media strategy that covers the four points above. Thanks Sean for recognizing this and we’ll be listening if you need anything else from us in the future!
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Sean Weigold Ferguson
