I’m a Fan of Seesmic
I met Loic Le Muir (@loic) at SXSW this week and told him how inspired I was by his product – Seesmic/Twhirl and the way he used instant publishing to report recently from Switzerland when he was interviewing Kofi Annon and inviting people on Twitter to send him interview questions. (Incidentally, It has directly led to me heading to London next month to report on the G20 gathering there.)Loic grabbed his Flip video camera and asked his wife Geraldine to hold the camera while he interviewed me. He in turn asked me some questions about the importance of fans and how he should be interacting with them?
4 Things you could do for your Fans
I’m inspired by Loic’s understanding of the value of his relationship to his fans. Here are four things you could probably do better for your fans.
- Fans get an identitiy, something that makes them feel part of the company. Fans become #teamseesmic members
- Loic and the team are continuously search the Twitter comment stream for brand names and hashtags and respond to people using their product and raving about it. Loic says there is a seesmic reference on Twitter every three minutes. He knows because he is monitoring it
- Loic takes the time to give shout-outs to his fans in email newsletters. In a previous newsletter, he linked to a mashup of of users who posted video raving about their product – again, Seesmic monitors the videos being posted on their site and Loic even occasionally pops in with a short video response to people using his product.
- Loic genuinely cares about how many times he is contacting his fans. He asks for fans opinion - “How often should I be sending out email to fans? – not wanting to send too much, but not wanting to appear too distant.” My suggestion for him was, “Loic, you are doing a lot of things right! I give presentations and use your organization as an example of best practices.”
Incidentally, Loic is not a big fan of the word “fan” instead preferring to call his fans part of his “team”. It was a great little moment in a very large and sometimes too large event here in Austin, that reminded me of the importance of fans.
