Social networking has been a part of the customer service and shopping experience at Kukui Grove Center for over a year.  Our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, and other social media sites has allowed us to expand our online reach, beyond traditional website capabilities, to build relationships and communicate with our customers about services, sales, merchants, and community events.

We utilize social media to increase Kukui Grove’s advertising exposure at every opportunity.  After a year of creating a database of online followers and fans, we decided to test Kukui Grove’s social media reach initially by promoting a new Toddler Thursday event via our Twitter and Facebook pages. The results were amazing!  Attendance increased each week.  Recently, we garnered our largest turnout of more than 81 toddlers thus, providing valuable entertainment for our weekday consumers and increasing pedestrian traffic for our merchants.

Social networking is changing the way we do business everyday.  Kukui Grove has received great benefit from social networking, and we are certain that your business can too.

Here are a few of my tips on using social media:

• Clarify your objectives, develop a strategy, and execute appropriate tactics.
• To increase traffic to your social media site, always include who, what, where, when, and why.
• Partner with neighboring businesses to promote special offers.
• Create an online “code” that only your followers will know to track store sales, purchases, etc.
• Promote your social networking presence through email blasts or one of your current advertising vehicles.
• Negative feedback is okay. Plan a strategic response to negative and positive feedback before responding.
• Lastly, the most important thing is to listen and engage — it’s social! Don’t be afraid to speak, ask, and “mingle!”

Visit Kukui Grove Center at www.kukuigrovecenter.com, www.Twitter.com/KukuiGrove, www.Facebook.com/KukuiGroveCenter, and http://kukuigrovecenter.posterous.com.

It has been said that in recent years, we are experiencing a worldwide epidemic of loneliness.  People are hungry for connection and community, so it’s no surprise that social media like Twitter and Facebook have become wildly popular.

Creating opportunities for your customers, clients, vendors, and employees to connect is a great PR tactic in strengthening their relationships with each other and most simply, keeping everyone happy.

How can you create social connections in your business? Encourage employees to eat lunch together or exercise in groups during breaks.  Plan social events and invite your target publics. If you have a company meeting or training, be sure it has a social component to it, a time when attendees can informally interact. Have a place in your office where employees can gather, like a kitchen or break room and make sure it has the amenities to hold at least several people (e.g., a table and some chairs).  If your business utilizes Twitter, plan tweetups to get to know your followers.  On a smaller scale, take the time to chat with people with whom you come into contact.  Smile, be friendly, compliment them, show some interest in their lives, and just get to know them.  In other words, connect.

1)    Clean up and clear out.  Clutter is useless and takes up space that could be better used.  Having stacks of old things around is also unattractive.  Give your customers, your employees, and yourself more room to move around and a nice, organized space in which to work.  Be merciless about the clearing.  Donate items that you can no longer use to a nonprofit that might be able to use them.  Recycle what you can.  If there are things you absolutely cannot part with, organize them, label them, and put them in storage.  A cleaner, clearer workspace will make everyone feel better – your customers, your employees, and you, and it will symbolically provide the needed open space for useful, and perhaps moneymaking things and ideas.

2)    Innovate.  If there’s a problem, or even minor irritation, that’s affected your business for eons, now’s the time to focus on a solution.  Innovation and creativity are in the air.  And, in this case, it’s even better if you have an extremely limited budget.  It will force you to be more creative to find a new, better way to do something.

3)    Twitter.  We have found Twitter to be one of the best ways to get our messages out to our target publics immediately, for free, and with very little effort.  For tips on how to get on Twitter and use it well, see our Tweet 16 and other Twitter posts on our blog.

So what’s the PR connection? Anything you do that helps you develop or improve your relationship with your publics is indeed public relations.  Your job is to do the right things and then tell the world about it.  In the case of cleaning up and clearing out, use that as an excuse to have a little open house or a grand re-opening to show off your new and improved environs.  When you come up with an innovative solution to your problem, share it with everyone you can.  It will gain you respect and set you up as a leader (and pioneer) in your industry.  As far as Twitter goes, the benefits speak for themselves.  It’s a way to directly communicate with people who have voluntarily signed up to hear what you’re doing.  So go for it!  In today’s economy, opportunities arise out of what you create.

First of all, Twitter gives you a one-degree separation between you and the people and businesses on Twitter. Move out of the way, Kevin Bacon, Twitter’s got you beat!  It’s so easy to Tweet your favorite celebrity, reporter, business, and so on. Of course you’ll need to do a little investigating (quick Google search) to make sure the user you’re tweeting is the “real” person or business you’re looking for (versus imposters). And, many times, they will reply back to you. We’ve tweeted to and received replies from Al Roker, KGMB9 News, Starbucks, Zippy’s, and Andy Bumatai, to name a few. So cool! We know it’s cheesy to be star struck, but we don’t care…we LOVE it!  As a frequent Starbucks drinker, I was thrilled and very impressed with the prompt response I got when I tweeted @Starbucks a question one day. In terms of brand loyalty, can you imagine how my original warm-and-fuzzy feelings for my favorite coffee stop got even warmer and fuzzier (and led to more visits and purchases)?

We’ve been exposed to the “cool-ness” of Twitter but recently, we were again amazed by the power of Twitter. I was tweeting with FMPR’s Twitter friend @johngarcia, a web designer and photographer in Honolulu. We were talking about the Keurig single cup coffee maker, which uses the “K-cup, an individual cup of your favorite hot beverage concentrate (coffee grinds, tea leaves, chai mix, cocoa, etc.) to brew your drink. We were trading our K-cup favorites when I tweeted him, “Once we got the hot chocolate K-cup from Macy’s n it tasted like plastic…beware of that one.” He replied,” Darn, I think we have that one, too… oh wells… those’ll be filler in the carousel. ” That was my last Twitter conversation of the night, and I headed off to bed without a second thought (well, I did think about getting a cup of coffee from my sister’s Keurig, but decided to pass on that since it was practically midnight and even though we’re neighbors, I didn’t think she would appreciate me dropping by at that hour).

The next morning when I checked our Twitter account, Green Mountain Coffee @GreenMtnCoffee, who apparently is the maker of that particular hot chocolate K-cup had tweeted us, “@fmpr We understand you were not satisfied with Hot Cocoa. It is important that the k-cups are kept at room temp. & shaken prior to use.” Ahhh! At first I was stunned and a little embarrassed that the actual hot chocolate company had “caught” me criticizing their product. But then I thought to myself that I wasn’t totally bashing them and I was telling my truth. I immediately tweeted @johngarcia who got a good chuckle from it and suggested I blog about it (thanks again, John), and it got me thinking more about this experience. This was customer service at its finest. I didn’t even have to contact the company, they came to me. And, to tell you the truth, if they hadn’t tweeted me, I would have gone along with my life adding this company to my “never-buy-or-try-again list.” But because of this interaction, I am willing to give them another chance, maybe not with that particular flavor, but with another one. Importantly, I have positive feelings about the way that they reached out to me. It showed me that they care about their customers and their reputation, and they are not afraid to address the undesirable feedback about their products. This counts for a lot. I will never forget this experience and that company’s name.

So, if you have a business, consider using Twitter and think about how you can reach out to your customers like never before. If you’ve dismissed the idea of Tweeting before because of the time it’ll take to learn or to administer during the day, think (or tweet) again…it has the potential to revolutionize your image.

Ever since we opened an account on Twitter, people have been coming up to us to ask us how Twitter works.  Twitter definitely takes some time to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s fun and opens you up to a world of people and opportunities.  To help you get started, here are our Tweet 16, the top facts and tips to help you get into the Twitterverse action. 

1. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a micro-blogging site, which means that a Twitter post is limited to only 140 characters.  That means each letter, space, symbol, etc. is counted as one character. In contrast, a blog post can be any length you wish.
2. A post on Twitter is called a “tweet.”
3. The original purpose of a tweet was to answer one question: “What are you doing?” However, tweets have now evolved to include anything from the link to their latest blog to asking questions (one woman asked the Twitter community if they could tweet her the city bus schedule on her route, and she got the schedule within minutes!), sharing business tips, and so on.
4. Twitter is absolutely free! There is no fee to set up an account.
5. Once you have a Twitter account, you will have a home page in the Twitter site that will feature your name, location, bio, people you follow, and people that follow you. You can post a message from your home page and check to see if anyone has mentioned you or sent you a direct message (more on this later).
6. To keep tabs on topics, people, and organizations that are interesting to you, you can follow any Twitter user by clicking on the “follow” button found near their username. Following a user means that their tweets will filter in real time through to your home page so you can see the latest about what they’re doing, thinking, eating, etc.
7. In turn, any Twitter user can follow you.
8. All Twitter usernames are always prefaced by the “@” symbol when featured in any tweet, regardless if you are addressing that user or just mentioning something about them. For example, if you were referring to a stay at The Grand Hyatt Kauai, you would say “Had a wonderful weekend vacationing @GHKPoipu!” And, you can get to any user’s home page by going to www.twitter.com/USERNAME (e.g. www.twitter.com/GHKPoipu).
9. You can reply to any Tweet at any time. When viewing a tweet, have your cursor hover over the right side of the post and a swooping arrow will appear. Click on that arrow, and you can reply to that user about their tweet.  Remember that anytime you reply to someone, your reply is public. It will appear on your public timeline, or profile, as it is referred to from your home page, for all to read. Replies must stay within the 140 character limit.
10. To privately send a user a message, you can send a direct message. However, you can only direct message someone if they follow you.  If not, the only way to communicate with them is via a public reply.
11. To make it easy for you, any time your username is mentioned on Twitter, it will be cataloged in your @yourusername menu item on the right side of your home page.
12. A retweet, or RT, is when one user repeats what another has posted because they like, agree with, or want to emphasize the content of the tweet. When retweeting, begin the post with RT and the @username followed by their tweet.
13. Twitter is a community based on reciprocity.  Top twitterers follow those that follow them, join in on the conversation, don’t tweet only about themselves or what serves them, and add value to others.  Sure, you can observe and take a back seat as you’re becoming familiar with tweeting, but once you are, participate!
14. As with any social networking medium or electronic messaging system, Twitter has its share of spam, or junk tweets.  You’ll learn to recognize and filter these out of your home page.  In these cases, especially for spam harassers (spammers that won’t leave you alone), you will want to block these users. 
15. Along the same lines, treat Twitter as you would any electronic public forum and be careful with your personal, private information.  One individual’s house was burglarized after tweeting that they would be on vacation.
16. Now that you have the basics on Twitter, if you’re still not quite sure you understand it, don’t feel badly.  We experienced the same feeling. We had been reading about and observing Twitter for some time before we actually signed up. It wasn’t until we jumped in and tried it that we got the full gist of it. And, we are still learning new things as we go along.  So, if you have an interest in tweeting, try it out.  It’s the perfect way to understand and become a proficient twitterer.

 We hope these Tweet 16 tips are a helpful introduction to Twitter. Let us know if you have more questions. For now, we’re off to check out the latest news from The Garden Island (@thegardenisland), the weather from Guy Hagi (@GuyHagi), what Augie T (@augz1) is up to, where Ron Margolis (@RealtorRon) will be playing jazz next, what Giada De Laurentiis (@GDeLaurentiis) is cooking up in her kitchen, any new listings from Kymry Perez (@KymryPerez), what’s new at the Kauai Humane Society (@KauaiHumane), the latest from Ukulele Underground (@UUrayan), what Demi Moore is doing tonight (@mrskutcher), how to boost our website functions from kauaichelle (@kauaichelle), and getting a coffee question answered by Starbucks Coffee (@Starbucks).  …Oh, and when you get on Twitter, feel free to follow us at @FMPR. Tweet us, and let us know you read our blog. We’ll follow you back! Tweet out!

If you want to know what President Obama is doing right now, you can log on to his Twitter site at twitter.com/BarackObama.  If you wanted to ask the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs a question about the war with Hamas, you could have logged onto that Twitter account on December 30, 2008 for their worldwide Twitter press conference.  Businesses use Twitter to provide product and service information to their customers. News sources use it to disseminate breaking news.  Celebrities use it to communicate with their fans. Universities use it to send information to their students.   And on November 28, 2008, CNN announced that it was “the day that social media appeared to come of age” when Twitter was used by victims, bystanders, and the public to generate news and coordinate responses to the Mumbai siege.

If you set up an account on twitter.com, you can send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters or less. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends and users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or through a number of other applications.   You can even “tag” a tweet if you have an area of specific interest.  To follow FMPR on Twitter, see our FMPR Twitter page.

How popular is Twitter and how fast is it growing?  Wikipedia says that in November 2008, Twitter had between four and five million users.  By February 2009, that number grew to roughly six million with the number of monthly visitors at 55 million, making Twitter the third largest social network behind Facebook and MySpace.

There you have it, another way to reach out to your publics.  We particularly like Twitter because the micro-blogging 140-character limit doesn’t take up much time on the writer and reader end.  For a great primer on Twitter, check out Caroline Middlebrook’s “The Big Juicy Twitter Guide.”  And then jump in your online tree and tweet away!