Social media can not fix the world but it is a pretty bandaid

Posted on April 27, 2011 by teds

This morning in stumbled on an awesome infographic from @TWCableHelp about their social support process. I have to hand it to Time Warner, the explination is well executed and the stats are impressive – big kuddos to their social team. Problem is, I live in an community with over 750 units that Time Warner serves and I can’t recall hearing many [any?] positive comments about them. Their support team’s doing all the right things yet it’s not fixing the perception problem.

As social has gone from something the business world laughs at [anyone who pitched the value of a user community before 2006 knows what I’m talking about] to the place where everyone has to be we’ve lost a little clarity in the middle – [corporate] social doesn’t fix your underlying problem, it merely treats the symptoms.

Got a defective product? The one you replaced for Sally via twitter is just going to break again.
Service keeps going out? Facebook updates don’t make your 2 million fans any happier, just wise enough to know to head to a friend’s house to use their alternative provider.
Activists don’t think you’re up to par on ethical values? A couple blog comments won’t reverse that

What social can do, and does a great job of, is allowing you to bandaid the issues. If you’re lucky the cut is small enough that the bandaid holds it back and let it heal back up. You can’t increase product quality via twitter but you can issue a recall, troubleshoot issues and resolve them in near real time. That’s a great and thanks to 1:1 interaction earns you back some of the credibility you lost – the scar however does not go away.

But for every customer who tweets, facebooks, yelps, blogs or posts openly many more complain in “social silence” – that is to say, they post or share a comment to a network you can’t see, can’t measure and can’t touch. That’s where the problem festers and eventually grows from a couple bad experiences to a bad perception.

What Time Warner’s social team is doing should be applauded. It’s the right step for their support / marketing department to help upset customers on their own terms and something I wish more brands I used did; but it only helps as far as a bandaid can.

Many of us, probably all of us, are guilty of driving social programs that try to mask a deeper problem. I’ve certainly done it. And why not? It’s a direct solution, something we can do fast, and justify back with engagement counts and posts. In a world where executives and shareholders want to see us all using the latest and greatest social media is what gets the funding, the attention. But you can’t scale responding to problems. You can’t hire enough nice people or give out enough coupons to make up for a problem that won’t go away.

Instead of building up autonomous social support teams with the blessing of the C-levels, that momentum and interest needs to be taken into improving the full experience. Product to fulfillment to marketing to support. Only then can a company really expect their social support team to be empowered enough to be able to help grow the business, otherwise we’re just stuck with bandaids and eventually those fall off.

Related reading (aka others have said something like this before me)

Social Media & customer service: Are you scalable? – Smart Blogs

Are You Using Social Media as a Band-Aid for Poor Customer Service? – Right Place Marketing

The social media band aid mentality – The Email Guide

Icons and the everyday user: Where does social influence lie?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by teds

“When a celebrity with a lot of followers tweets something, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get an avalanche of traffic.” – Ricky Van Veen, co-founder and CEO of College Humor [SocialTimes.com].

Van Veen’s comment, while just a single remark in a much broader interview, pries into an ongoing dilemma that marketing is facing – who influences consumers?

In the “old days” brand marketing became almost formulaic: Take a compelling message, put a compelling plot behind it and pair it up with an icon to really drive results. Browse old TV or Print ad archives and its clear: this worked. Fast forward into the modern age and celebrity visibility has not gone away, in fact thanks to inventions like reality TV, twitter and just the simple amount of information consumers are able to access, celebrities have likely become even bigger.

But the role of the celebrity has changed.

Today’s celebrity is important and visible making them an ideal cornerstone to whip up attention. Attention however is not, as any direct marketer will tell you, sales. Today’s consumer is informed; right or wrong there is more information out there than anyone wants to read, a significant shift from when John Wayne put his name behind Camel cigarettes. A celebrity is an icon.

“Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase” – Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – October 2008 via Business Week

On the other hand, if you take a look at the Social Commerce Stats page BazaarVoice maintains and you’ll find literally hundreds more quotes about the power, demand and use of ratings and reviews like the one above. When it gets down to brass tax, it is the everyday user who, through a good post, a bad post, or even no post, makes or breaks the sale.

One conversation between a group of friends; one pseudo-anonymous 5 star review on Amazon; one rant on a Facebook wall. It all adds up to trust, credibility and authentic support. Technology has made people aware of what other people think. The user is now the influencer.

The right celebrity still has value, but relevancy matters.

When Eminem paired up with Chrysler for the Super Bowl / Detroit ad the first comments were surprise and after a few minutes the conversation became very positive (10 million views later it’s still rolling with 32,000 thumbs-up to just 1,600 down). Eminem wasn’t saying this was the best car ever – he was an icon of the location bringing attention back to it and the brand that is represented by it. An endorsement of the brand and where it’s going was something authentic and it worked.

Similarly there are many celebrities who have built their brand in social channels. Ashton Kutcher is probably the most common example, and why not, he has over 6.5 million twitter followers and while the vast majority of these individuals are likely not even using Twitter anymore, have little “Klout”, he’s spent enormous time setting up his personality as someone accessible and connected. If you can get @aplusk to talk about a brand that’s relevant to who is as a persona, you can find success.

Flip it around and unfortunately there’s a lot more bad than good. Look at the 10 Strangest Celebrity Endorsements blog and you’ve got the former U.S.S.R. president positioned next to one of the flagships of consumerism: Louis Vuitton. Flip on TV and you’ve had the outspoken A-Team member, “Mr. T”, talking about cooking products. These are ads that draw visibility, perhaps get the person’s attention, but are not going to close a sale [unless it’s a practical joke].

It’s not a black and white subject… brands will not, cannot just drop celebrities, too much visibility is at stake; but the icons that they use must be the right partner to support their brand, and frankly, the icon’s as well.

So what is a marketer to do?

In my career I’ve had the chance to work on a number of celebrity driven marketing campaigns and without giving away any specific on which ones or at which role, I’m quite certain that they create noise, attention and awareness which are all good things. Sales however require something more – visibility paired with believability.

In a world with social media nothing is more important than the authenticity that user generated content can bring, except perhaps for people wanting to see if the product is really that good in the first place. You can’t do a good job in convincing people to buy when no one is looking at you, so while I wouldn’t rely on a random celebrity to sell my products any more than I would believe their ad as a consumer, their voice can bring the right attention to push people to take that next look.

Just imagine an ad where a major celebrity, someone with a family, in the spotlight talked about their first trip to Disneyland and told you to read a million “real” experiences on the new Disney stories page. Or an ad with a musician telling you that they went to iTunes for the best new songs, rated by you, the users. Attention getting, believable and relevant.

Celebrity marketing can work. It just works best when you understand that an icon doesn’t influence, we do.

Where are the social deals? Daily deals in a social media driven world.

Posted on April 11, 2011 by teds

Daily deals are this year’s hot thing in social. Problem is they aren’t social.

When daily deals first launched, hitting the minimum participants to “activate” the deal wasn’t a given and that made them social as people would have to bring friends in to get things going. Years later Groupon, LivingSocial and other leaders have too many users to have to worry about “qualifying” thus the social aspect is gone & deals have become glorified coupons that you just buy into.

Now don’t get me wrong. I may have critiqued the relevancy of daily deals in the past and am now joining others in questioning their business viability but I don’t doubt the potential of deals as a gateway for discovery, and value service to consumers – they just need a little network power to get to exciting. So as we watch Facebook prepare to roll out its deal offering, Google move into social & deals and Groupon and LivingSocial battle for control of the current market, I thought I’d take a crack at what the future could look like.

Deals are better when they’re done together [rhyming not intended]

Late one evening, a few weeks back I got a text from a friend (let’s call her “Sally”) asking if I wanted to jump in on a LivingSocial deal for White Water Rafting. Sally, knowing I raft frequently, wanted to put together a group trip and saw the deal as as great opportunity. To me that’s exactly what daily deals are for: great offers on services that people were considering, and now have a tipping point to take action on — together.

Problem is, it was 10pm, the deal expired in 2 hours and we all had to commit to make it work – no one wanted to take the first plunge and the deal was missed.

Risk stops purchases; but what if you could remove it?

What if, rather than a mass text, followed by a lot of hoping and messaging back, my friend, had been able to set the whole thing up as a group deal contingent on her network participating:

- Sally decides this deal is for her, looks at the calendar, picks an available date, creates an event and invites 20 people who she’d like to have show up… It hits their email, sms, facebook wall or twitter handle, their call.

-The threshold on the deal is also set based on the offer type. For white water rafting its one full boat – 6 heads. More can join but without 6 the deal is not on. Other services could have a threshold as low as 2 for a spa day or 4 for dinner out, but always a group.

-Sally’s friends get an alert that there’s a deal expiring in a few hours with the right details – the time, the place and the cost. Since they already have accounts they can confirm it right from their iphones but there’s no risk, the deal only goes if the threshold is hit.

-5 people are excited to try out rafting and convince #6 to join via a Facebook group message. The deal is on. Go Sally!

Whether it’s white water rafting, learning to rock climb, or a spa day, deals are overwhelmingly for services people do together but the current systems drive individual purchase and does nothing to address the fear of being the only one to go in.

By flipping the model back to its roots and enforcing a commitment minimum, not from all participants, but from a network of friends the risk is gone and there’s a whole new motivation for people to buy.

————–

Update: as of 8/26/2011 Facebook has announced they are closing down their deal service. In my opinion they had the best shot at truly creating a discovery tool by leveraging what no other deal site really has: relationships. But ultimately it’s a peripheral service and without enough attention, likely never got the legs to have a fair shot.

Combating the inevitable service issue: Building an army of advocates, or at least positive posters.

Posted on February 15, 2011 by teds

I don’t work in the flower industry, don’t know much about the business (beyond how to order products at least) but when Teleflora made a Facebook post with a customer service email address the day after Valentine’s Day, the reason why was pretty obvious – something had gone wrong – something which was making people very, very upset.

Of course anyone working in ecommerce, or any corporation, could have told you there would be problems. Tens of millions of flower orders , dozens of companies, and just 18 or so hours to get them all there on time (but not too early), it’s only logical that some orders would fail within the process… Some complaints were inevitable.

And some level of complaints are inevitable for almost all b2c companies. No matter how perfect the process is, something will fail at some point and whether it’s the fault of the company or something entirely out of their hands, like the weather, it’s all going to come back on them, and these days back to social media. So knowing that something bad will happen, it’s up to us as marketers/ social strategists to insure that when problems come up we have the right plans to respond, but also that they don’t dominate the conversation or become the purpose of our page. We need to be more than just support channels .

Going back to my Teleflora example (and to be clear and not just pick out one company, the same issue is happening with ProFlowers and others that I checked), something is missing – balance. On the pages of most flower brands I visited just about everything was negative and support related. If these companies had happy customers (and I know they do because I am one) they were nowhere to be found and likely for good reason, no one had asked them to join up and share.

My suggestion to flower business earlier in the week was to provide an insert with orders for people to evangelize their great orders (or their bad ones, a review is what it is). All it takes is a simple note to remind people to comment, to tell them where you are, and out of the millions, thousands or even of just hundreds of customers you touch, you’ll get some balance… You’ll get light advocates.

Take this a step further, build a social program that encourages fan participation before the issue and you’ll be far more prepared when one does strike. This is where best practices really kick in – buying fans in masse with discounts, coupons and giveaways is easy and gets numbers, but successfully cultivating them takes a great deal more than good offers, it takes useful content, engaging directly around posts other than support, even how the business goes to market, the policies and programs that you have and how your fans react to them. But if you can build a dialogue and a regular flow (and yes, this is possible for even seemingly mundane brands) then you have moderate advocates on and around to help when there are negatives, to explain that there is a good to the bad, and to be talking about things other than support and trouble. And of course if you really go all the way, develop that full advocacy program and engage customers to become brand evangelists, community leaders, and the like, well now you have a whole force of people to balance and even better, aid.

Now don’t get me wrong, the issue customers are having with their flower orders are certainly very real and need a response, not to be buried or hidden by a flood of off topic discussions. Transparency is good, real responses are what matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have both – it is again a balance of what your social media channels do for you and your customers.

As for the support side, we all know it isn’t easy, or cheap, but it is something which companies tend to get… and here, the flower companies are doing a good job of responding 1:1, giving direct email addresses, and all of the other support processes you’d hope for when customers are upset and support lines are backed up with callers… they may not be perfect but they’re on it for this part. But while the support side is going well, when all people see is bad, they get more upset, the assume nothing is going right, and they lose the benefit of peer to peer support or comments to turn too.

And that’s why you need your fans to know, connect and be involved with your social media presence now, when things are good. Social media is not just about offers and sales generation, not just a support system, but when used right, it can be a dialogue platform to get insights, have the right discussions that curtail or stop issues early on, and yes, be a place where people share all the great things your product / service / brand are doing that may them advocates and repeat customers.

Are you a change agent? How businesses evolve, thrive and eventually stagnate in a changing world

Posted on February 1, 2011 by teds

Recently a senior marketer in my group announced her resignation, as I was discussing this with a few of the members of my web team they kept expressing their surprise that she would leave given that she had worked with us for just a few years and now, seemed to really be in a place to leverage the success she had built in her time with us. To these “veterans” (7 plus years) the notion of leaving didn’t make sense.

Rather than trying to explain a particular reason for why she may have left, I commented to my coworkers that this individual was a builder while they were maintainers. Given that these terms were my own on-the-fly creation, this lead to a lengthy discussion about the role people play within their organizations and how a smart organization looks at people not just as long terms resources, but as fitting into an evolving puzzle.

Whether it was the Internet, social media, or the printing press, the one thing that is certain in business is that trends and tactics will change. The smart companies are the ones that adapt to these new concepts fast, ideally before they are even seen as true evolutions, while companies that conservatively wait, end up struggling to remain relevant and, oftentimes, to remain profitable. People play a major part of this cycle as well — like the marketer who I mentioned before — her role was critical in bringing a certain amount of strategy to reality; something which other types would not have been able to do so swiftly.

The evolution within a business comes through a continuous cycle comprised of four distinct, although potentially overlapping, phases. It is a company’s ability to understand, staff, and adapt at each of these stages that dictates its success in transitioning into new marketing eras.

1- Change -

When a new business method begins to take root, it’s difficult to embrace and understand. These ideas, from the printing press that took businesses into a mass market world, to Television replacing Radio and Print as an awareness building tool, or the most recent example of internet and social media empowering consumers to learn and engage outside of the corporate gates, it’s almost always scary times to the establishment. Change is frightening personally as it may mean a role is no longer needed, a person is no longer relevant and corporately, as it is almost always costly and significant to shift an organization.

Thus when it comes time for a significant shift there is usually conflict. The first person who introduced a direct response TV buying to the Marketing VP was probably shot down a dozen times… In hindsight it seems silly, after all, who wouldn’t want more targeted media at better rates, but at the time it was an idea that risked harming what was working.

The change agents who stir up the status quo and suggest the new idea face an uphill battle. Generally they are coming from the middle or lower ranks, younger, and newer to the organization, having seen an idea in their own lives that they wish to bring to their organization and are passionate about (although this is not a requirement as evidenced by Steve Jobs who changed apple to a music, media and portable company in his 40s).

The individual or individuals who introduce a new idea must have immense passion for it to withstand the inability of their peers and organization to change. Often this is not possible and the person who introduces a new approach or new idea finds itself moving onto an organization that’s already clued in and read to move. This is the toughest role but without a change agent it is impossible for a company to adopt a new idea early on and instead it is only when it has become beyond mainstream that the organization brings it in.

2 – Build –

It maybe days or years from the time from which an idea transitions from introduction to acceptance, but once it has been internalized, the desire to act is usually very swift and may come with little thought or planning… This is the fire-drill reaction now that the business realizes it has something hot on its hands.

If a change agent has the patience and fortune to be able to stick around, he will get the benefit of implementing, but if not the company will go out and look for an expert, a person who can champion the idea. Of course, if the concept is new, say paid search marketing in the very late 90s, the talent pool is extremely small, if any experienced individuals exist at all, and requires the company to be very flexible in who they bring in (internally or externally) to take on the challenge… If they wait for perfection the business will miss any early advantage.

The build phase is one of constant trial, retrial and ultimately great success (or dismal failure). During this period companies are building up their new approach and running in multiple directions as they struggle to figure out a strategy rather than just using tactics. For a truly early stage, innovative company, this is the period to lead an entire industry.

3 – Maintain –

After enough time of running around and building various programs, the winning ideas emerge over lesser thoughts and a program emerges to be pursued. This is the start of the maintenance period–an indefinite time in which the company thrives as their proven program drives continued success.

This is a period of steady growth as investments made during build pay off, marketing, production and operational triggers are optimized (rather than being invented) and small adjustments propel the company to see even better revenue. Boards, shareholders, customers remain content as everything progresses…. It’s not about excitement or headlines, but instead, it is a time of stable growth.

While they may still exist within the organization, few change agents are seen during this time and those that are present bring forward smaller ideas, often facing strong resistance, after all, everything is going well.

4 - Stagnate -

Eventually, whether through laziness, blindness, or simply marketplace innovations which are not matched, companies start to slip. What was a steady, albeit slow, evolutionary process, turns into treading water as the company leaves maintenance and begins to stagnate. In the right conditions this transformation can be so subtle initially that revenue and other key metrics continue to grow.

Stagnation is, of course, an eventual path towards death and what companies and marketers fear and fight to push off.

If the organization is truly open, the early signs of stagnation can be identified quick enough to avoid the most impact as the company, seeing a marketplace challenge, jumps into conflict with both feet to embrace what is new. Even more successful businesses parallel process the entire cycle and are already conflicting while maintenance takes place allowing themselves to evolve before they even smell an issue… This level of prepared growth is something I will explore further later in this post.

However, these are the exceptions, not the rule. For most companies, and the examples are too numerous to count, stagnation is already occurring, even as a company sees itself as succeeding.

The issue of course is complacency. The best ideas can quickly become the last idea, but to those who launched it, this is often impossible to see.

Take the evolution of social media sites. While geocities and private communities had been around for over a decade, it was Friendster that started a mass network and then Myspace that, leveraging Friendster’s network issues, grew to dominate the “social” landscape in 2006. Myspace honed in on users’, especially young ones, desire to have their own profiles connected with people they knew offline and on. Enabling them with a simple, yet highly customizable solution, sign ups seemed unstoppable.

But within a few years they had stopped. We all know the reason — Facebook. But it was not that Facebook was better that doomed Myspace, it was that Myspace had already failed itself by stopping true innovation.

Myspace believed their platform was what users wanted and rather than developing better ways to connect or evaluating the implications of their open (and therefore very slow, very cluttered) system, they focused on new content. In all likelihood, this was where research led them — users wanted more music, more goodies, but behind the scenes they didn’t realize that what they were really looking for was something more connected.

Facebook came in, without any expectation of being a half billion member site 4 years later, and put better features in place that met the user’s needs. To be clear, it was not a feature war as much as an ideation one… Facebook got that people wanted a sense of exclusivity and used schools to launch. They understood that it was the actions of people’s friends over that of their own that got them to come back and they used what really amounted to less features, less control to win. And still Myspace didn’t see the writing on the wall. They remained confident in their size, their solution and direction. They didn’t return to conflict fast enough, or to a wide enough degree to regain the upper hand. And that was that.

Speaking of social networking, the evolution of digital and now social properties has vastly changed the concept of a stagnating business. 50, or even 15 years ago a business cycle just like the one I have described existed, but it took time, lots of time. Information flowed slowly to companies, which could, and in fact had to, develop slowly to allow consumers to keep up with their innovations.

But just as digital gives us new challenges in how we go to market, it also changes how we have to evolve within the market. The ability to rapidly connect to millions of users is a tool that may not have existed a week ago, but changes everything. It’s no longer about years, products, services and information that can change at an amazing rate. This requires organizations to look at their cycles differently and recognize that as quickly as they innovate, they may be out of style, especially in larger organizations where shifting still means embracing paid search, let alone the latest twitter trends.

Stagnation is what kills, but it’s also what starts the next step as companies drive to react to the new market, the new products or whatever else has changed and so we jump, fall or get pulled kicking and screaming back to conflict and restarting the cycle.

——-

While understanding these stages, it is inherently vital to addressing them, it is equally, if not more important to grasp the paradox that they reveal in business — the need to innovate and the simple desire to thrive off of what is already working and proven. More on that next week…

Social Media Strategies: You can’t afford to turn the computer off Friday at 5

Posted on December 23, 2009 by teds

I think it’s safe to say we all enjoy getting away from the office at least sometimes but for many companies, social stops when the clock strikes 5 (or maybe 6). While there’s a lot of logic behind this in the eyes of those doing the posting it doesn’t reflect the reality of the channel – customers don’t stop knocking. The notion of responding 24×7 or close to it isn’t new, many companies have customer service on 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, potentially every day of the year, but with so much of social being handled by more “senior” staff this philosophy is often forgotten.

When companies go away from their channels two important things happen – first the questions stack up which is an annoying experience for the customer who is waiting and the employee who must wade through tweets all of Monday but more importantly an opportunity is lost.

Think about it for a second – a few years ago your web traffic was probably minimal on the weekend and big during the week. Weekdays may still be bigger than weekends but it’s a digital world and people are online all days of the week, from the office, from the home, even the mall on their cell phone.
Think about it some more – issues happen 24×7 and in a connected world no one waits to hear back on Monday. By the time you respond to provide the insight your customer needs, they already bought or that new nasty video with an incorrect fact is already out there.

The solution is of course an unpleasant one for anyone reading this but it is reality. You need to be on more than from the office. Whether it’s a customer service rep taking an hourly glance at automated reports or your staff actually getting into the weeds the biggest gains happen when no one expects it. Respond at 9pm on a Sunday and you’ll wow a few power users. Get product announcement clarified and you’ll avoid the confusion from that one blog. It’s not like you aren’t already on checking your own accounts anyways…

Social Media Strategies: Who should respond? Customer service or marketing

Posted on December 21, 2009 by teds

We’ve all read the case studies about Comcast, Dell, Jetblue and a handful of other companies who have changed their business (or at least changed what the media said about their business) by engaging in social. But while it’s exciting to talk about getting your own strategy going and how to “blow up” your business social always come down to one simple question, whose going to respond and when?

On one hand you have your customer service team, a group accustom to working with customers, tasked with fixing problems and [hopefully] knowledgeable about your product, policies and other particulars.

On the other hand you’ve got marketing which is probably the group driving social and has the most access to specials, new campaign information and the juicy details the customer wants.

The problem with delegating out to customer service is that, unless you create new roles and train new staff, you’re responding 1 to 1 on a platform that’s seen by 1 to many. This may seem like a minor issue but when your response ends up on the front of a major blog it’s anything but. Marketing on the other hand is often out of touch with the details of the customer experience (and I’m saying this as a marketer) so getting into support requires learning those find points. Neither side is perfect.

The solution that I’ve always found to work best is the one that gets the customer what they want – the right answer, in the right format fastest. Whether this comes from marketing or customer service isn’t a matter of black or white, it’s a matter of who can do it and who can commit the time to checking Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Your Blog, The Other Blog, the new video site, the old video site, the second twitter account and that one last blog all the time. If your entire customer service team is hourly it’s not going to be them. If your marketing team isn’t willing to get into the trenches they should stick to strategy.

Either way you slice it the best idea is always to carve out that person. This can be a new resource if budget allows or an existing repurposed one. New clearly has the advantage of being able to get trained and focus on nothing else but sometimes that long time employee who is looking for a new change of pace already has the insights to know how to answer the product questions.

What’s most important, the detail you can’t forget ever is that people who contact you through social are doing so because it’s the channel they chose to use. If your resource doesn’t check it frequently, doesn’t respond well or just ends up pushing them to other channels there’s no use in having them there so whoever you pick, they need to have the permission and backing of the company to go out, give answers and perhaps use a little different tone or brand than may be the status quo – after all, this is social media.

Not going to respond, don’t bother playing in social media

Posted on September 17, 2009 by teds

The astonishing growth of Social Media can be attributed solely to the relationships that are developed through it. Indeed while social may have the term media attached, media is a far second to the social component. Thus when companies get involved in social they must remember that success comes only from a two way communication.

Coming into the social space is not a selective engagement; the second a twitter account is established, a facebook page launched or a video uploaded, customers gain a new channel by which to respond and respond they do. Unfortunately many organizations in their rush to get on the social train forget the purpose of social and therefore abuse and ultimately suffer as a result of their participation.
With twitter it is common for companies to setup shop and blast out special offers and discounts but remain silent when a question is asked. Instead of benefiting from a relationship these companies look clueless and add to the frustration that their customers already often have about reaching someone for help. On the other hand companies who respond are often praised and certainly preferred. People on social expect companies to act much like their personal contacts.

Getting it right is not a difficult task. In an ideal world both marketing and customer service should utilize the same social channels to sell and serve but even that is not always required. So long as someone with information, awareness and a list of support phone numbers can do a great job in connecting customers back to whatever it is they are looking for. Responding to questions asked directly is the first step but over time reaching out into conversations to provide assistance not only helps build a relationship with one customer but can quickly add to the overall visibility and positive impression of the organization. Companies who “get it” commonly see comments about how great their service is, even if phone or email users may have another opinion.

While acquisition marketing is a benefit of social, it’s wrong to make it the only focus or even the main focus for most companies. The true value of social as so many great case studies have indicated is in engagement, brand visibility and loyalty. Thus while offers are definitely successful it is ultimately about using social to reach out and be reached that brings real results. For companies who lack the resources, or simply are unwilling to go from talking to a customer to talking with a customer social is the wrong vehicle. As a customer of many businesses we all know that going without any response is one of the fastest ways to be turned away from a business. On the other hand the companies that get it, connect and are on our level are the ones we trust, chose and pass along to our networks.

Social media… it’s not just about reaching social adopters

Posted on July 2, 2009 by teds

Social is often talked about as a tactic to use to communicate with younger, technologically connected consumers. However just as social has evolved from community discussions to real time chatter, the reach and pervasiveness is changing as well and no business can afford to remain on the sidelines these days.

Earlier this week Bing introduced Twitter content into search results and for select individuals is even including Tweets directly. This is likely just the first step in what will become a much larger change in how search works. Twitter’s open, searchable network offers a whole new opportunity for search to remain relevant and real time. Even Facebook, the site which excelled because of it’s ample availability of controls and privacy options is moving towards open content and real time information as it pushes users to share pieces of their interactions more publicly.

While Bing may be the only engine to use social natively, consumers are already asking for others to do so. The Realtime Twitter Search Results FireFox plugin pulls tweets right into a search result, which as the screenshot below shows, puts social media front and center for a searcher.

As social becomes more categorized and even more utilized it’s completely possible that we will see social discussions start to replace webpages to answer questions and seek information. Users may have the option to view matching sites, tweets or simply post their own question which, thanks to real time networks, will likely be addressed in a matter of minutes if not faster.

All of this means that brands who are not participating in social are missing the opportunity to be seen well outside of the traditional social walls. Looking at the example above there is a clear opportunity to reach right into what a consumer needs and route them back to your business. Whether you’re a national chain looking to add to the conversation about your deals or an individual store talking to a local consumer about a question they had, when it starts showing up in search results not being found isn’t an option.