Welcome to the fourth installment of our Next Level Leadership Series, wherein we speak with TAB members about the challenges each small business owner faces in the contemporary business world. Through this series of interviews, we find how business owners have risen above and beyond to become Next Level Leaders.

This week we spoke with Will Truex, manager of Marketing, Advertising and Sales at Budget Home and Office Cleaning. Will kindly shared his experiences with social media work: from introducing Budget Home and Office Cleaning to outlets like LinkedIn and Flickr to running promotional campaigns on Twitter.

When was Budget Home and Office Cleaning founded?

We were founded in 1995. [My parents] started it, just the two of them, and then it exploded from there.

When did you start delving into social media? (I.e., how long have you been participating in social media?)

We weren’t doing anything with social media [before I took over the role]. We were doing a Facebook page that was basically a graveyard, wasn’t updated at all.

I started social media work when I started [full-time] with the company, last August. Social media was my only role, and as I advanced in the company and learned more from day to day, I got more responsibilities.

I started a Twitter account, looking into Google.

What social media outlets does Budget Home and Office Cleaning participate in? (E.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog, etc.)

Presently we have two Twitter accounts (residential and commercial); LinkedIn (my personal account); a Facebook fan page; a YouTube account; a Flickr account; and we have a blog (Google blogger).

I noticed you have Twitter updates on the Budget Home and Office Cleaning blog. How does that work?

By experimenting with blog layouts, I could incorporate Twitter feed, and the blog updates itself whenever I do a tweet. [The blog is updated] almost every single day.

How has Budget Home and Office Cleaning founds its voice online? That is, do you have corporate guidelines to follow while participating in social media, or do you trust your personal judgment?

Typically with Twitter accounts, if there’s an issue I am personally one way about, I do not include that in Budget Residential and Office account. I do my tweets impartially. If there’s an issue I care about, I generate a general statement but I won’t go either way. I’ll try and give both sides of the issue.

Never use profanity. I try to lighten the heavy subjects, et cetera.

Have you run any special promotions or marketing campaigns through social media?

I did run a contest that we ran on Twitter. I got the idea from another business. I would provide a code on Twitter at random time of the day. A customer could come across the code and get a discount off cleaning. I did [that promotion] early on in our social media campaign.

From 9 am to 2 pm, I like to schedule Tweets every hour. I use a platform where I can send it to multiple accounts (HootSuite). I do an article, and then an advertisement. I constantly give news and advertisements. Advertisements are usually links towards directly ways you can save money: coupons, et cetera.

I’ve gotten a good response. People find you on Twitter. I do a lot on green cleaning tips. One site, paper.li, featured one of my coupons.

Do you consider the promotions successful? How do you gauge success in social media?

Specifically with HootSuite, I can monitor who is looking at what. HootSuite has Google Analytics with Twitter. [There’s a] click summary – it gives you a report: who’s clicking what, in what region, what’s popular. Recently, we got a lot of clicks directly on Facebook and Twitter.

The way I gauge Twitter and other social media is traffic to our website, via Google Analytics. I also look at mentions, like mentions on Twitter. There’s a group of people, you develop relationships with people with similar interests. [There are] retweets on all the feeds I follow, that I find pertinent. You may not see a huge return, or lots of referrals, but the more people talk about you, the more you get known, the more it helps. You become so ubiquitous, you can’t be ignored – but you’re not in everyone’s face.

We were trying other methods – cold calls, door knockers, mass emails – none of them work like they used to. People want to see what a company has to offer on their own time.

[Our marketing] is all online and word of mouth. It works really, really well. The only cost is time. You need the time to update. If you don’t update, no one cares and your name disintegrates.

Businesses often cite social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter as a great place to hear, and respond timely to, customer complaints. Has participating in social media enabled you to engage more with customers? If so, how?

We’re very small, so it doesn’t happen very often. Typically it’s direct responses via email.

Our demographic is a different generation. Occasionally you’ll get a younger person [who is] more tech savvy.

Any interesting social media stories you can share with us?

When I started doing [our social media work], I got a little gun shy. I had correspondence with one woman who thought I was a spammer. I used to search for cleaning questions on Twitter, and I’d answer them. I wasn’t trying to sell anything, just offer advice.

One woman didn’t know who I was and thought I was trying to spam her. I told her I wasn’t trying to spam her, just help. If you don’t like free help, I don’t know what to do for you.

One time I made a mistake in giving advice. The person told me, I admitted my mistake, and told the truth. Once you put it out there, it’s out there – it will be there till we’re all dead. So you have to be careful what you say.

What do you like most about The Alternative Board and/or personal coaching you get?

TAB – my favorite part with Marcy and TAB is that I get unbiased input and different angles to approaching problems. I have different people from different professions, who think differently, who offer advice and hold you accountable. There’s accountability.

TAB is like a huge ocean where you can pull all these resources. It makes me be more experienced without having to go through all the years of experience. I get both real life experiences on my part, and I can learn from other people’s triumphs and struggles. TAB makes you wise beyond your years.

Twit happens. – Jay Baer

Twitter is a social media outlet that many businesses find useful in reaching out to their markets. Twitter is an especially helpful tool for small businesses, in that tweeting is a low cost marketing technique that can yield high return for little time and effort. Small business owners can use Twitter to promote sales, to discuss corporate news and to engage with customers directly. You can tweet links to your webpage, or your Facebook page, or simply to Internet miscellanea you think your customers would find interesting.

Last year, Edison Research released a comprehensive survey on Twittering in America. As of April 2010, only seven percent of Americans were using Twitter on a monthly basis (though 87 percent had heard of it, just one percentage point behind Facebook). Though a small percentage of the total population, these Twitter-ers are a strong and vocal minority – especially in the realm of business. The same study showed that 49 percent of monthly Twitter users follow companies or brands; only 16 percent of all other social network users (like Facebook) follow, or are fans of, companies or brands. As Jay Baer of Convince & Convert surmised: “Combined with their above average income and above average education, Twitter users’ propensity to interact with brands make them a huge potential source.”

Sounds pretty good, right?

As with anything that seems too good to be very true, Twitter usage in business comes with a few words of caution. The very nature of Twitter, quickly disseminated public messages from established persons (or personas), means that mistakes – from typos to major social taboos – are said, and set, and re-said over and over. It seems to be a natural rule of Twitter: the bigger the corporate boo-boo, the more quickly it spreads. (And given the 140-character limit on tweets, any typos might really look like a nifty space-saving device.)

If you’ve chosen to use Twitter in corporate communications, you have quite a few choices as to who will be sending out tweets. You can tweet from your own Twitter account, or have someone else send tweets from a general corporate account. Or you can have multiple voices, i.e. Twitter accounts, for your business. The idea, of course, is that whoever is in charge of sending corporate tweets must follow the same standards that you uphold in other corporate communications. This includes tone, philosophy, persona and approaches to customer service.

Mistakes on Twitter do happen, as the aforementioned Jay Baer highlighted recently, but like other corporate snafus, they can be managed with grace and style. Only with Twitter, you’ll have to do it in 140 characters or less.

For more on corporate Twittering, take a look at this Business Week online article that surveyed a few leading CEOs, and how they use Twitter to help their businesses.