Are the social tools we are using the right tools for our businesses?

Let’s start with a couple examples…

It’s Sunday afternoon and a man walks into Robins Brothers, “the world’s largest engagement ring store”. After having a great experience with the clerk and making a selection, he’s prompted to share the store by a kiosk on the door. Elated about the experience he quickly “validates” the store by liking it through Facebook. Before he makes the 5 minute drive home his soon-to-be fiancé’s friends have all posted back congratulating the two on an engagement that hasn’t happened. Whoops.

Fast forward a few days… the same man heads out with his [now] fiancé to watch a movie at the local theatre. The film is considered a “chick flick” but he likes it. After the movie, fandango asks him to post a review through his choice of social sites… all of which use his real name. Concerned from his last incident that he’ll get caught by his buddies he says nothing. Opportunity lost.

The next day the woman’s wife who works for a large corporation that was presented in the movie in a less than great way gets a call from her bosses’ boss asking about a comment she made about the brand integration on her new Twitter account.  Realizing that what she had said was public, she turns off the feed from the site where she posted to Twitter.

None of these are far fetched, in fact, they’re all based on real stories that have happened and you can bet there are millions more out there. From a casual comment on a “like” of a particular brand to noting a review on a product a friend would not have expected you to buy, people are increasingly aware of the association between their lives and their postings.

While there’s inherent benefits in forcing real identity around social content like accessing someone’s friend network, or even seeming necessity, like detailed commentary, that’s a pro we’ve created without necessarily considering the impact of the con.

Thus it comes down to a decision: more content or better validation.

Luckily most brands don’t have to pick one or the other. With a host of tools it’s possible to allow both sides and with tweaking, even seemingly open tools can be made rather private. For example, Facebook’s basic like button posts right to the wall while the much richer UI share widget allows the user to select to exclude or include friends. Simple messaging to explain this may encourage a user afraid of exposure to hit share.

Give people enough choice to decide what and how while matching their own need for privacy, all while encouraging them to influence others – which accomplish your goal of creating visibility and buzz, even if it’s not quite in the way you wanted.

I’ve been there before myself, several times. Between acquisitions, periods of rapid growth, outsourcing of departments and a myriad of other challenges, we saw social support as the way to quickly address a bad stigma about the brand’s service, long queue times and public critique over support. But while social support provided an apparent short term fix, the truth was we were making a long term mistake and conditioning our customers to turn to the wrong venue, a very public venue, to solve something which they asked us to, and we should have been able to, solve elsewhere.

When social support is “better”, that obviously means everything else is worse

Connected as consumers are, not everyone starts with twitter or Facebook and just as you don’t want to force a customer to pick email over the phone or the phone over an in store rep, forcing a customer to use a social channel, whether it’s directed or just the only place they find an answer in a timely manner, starts the whole conversation off on a negative foot.

At the same time you can bet that by the time they show up on your social support channel, they’ve already ranted about you… They’re coming in hot and the solution is no longer to give them a great experience, it’s to make up for a bad one.

Tainted, an engagement channel becomes a support stop

Every reply is an @ that shows up when someone loads your twitter account. Every Facebook, Blog or Foursquare comment remains front and center for the world to see hundreds, thousands of times in a single day. When you have a branded channel taking a barrage of help questions, when team leads or executives are becoming primary contact points, you’ve got a major miss that dilutes your ability to use social to engage, promote and build with your customers.

Customer service is marketing these days and a failure to any one offering leads to rants, complaints and a very public problem that is easily avoided by taking the same investment approach you’ve put into social support and spreading the ‘love’ around.

An offline customer is just as potent as an online

Often social support programs deliver higher service and better “gives” as company perceive that the visibility warrants a serious fix. While customers sure appreciate the extra gives, it’s a mistake to think that the most potent voice is the one coming to twitter. After all, what story is really going to get passed around… The airport customer bounced around by the front desk and phone support while stranded at the airport or the guy tweeting. Anyone has the potential to take a negative viral and everyone shares bad experiences. Channel is not the qualifier.

Adding to this, customers are increasingly connected so if you let a policy, or five, slip on Facebook posts, you can bet people will circumvent other channels and go right to you there… Good for your stats, bad for the business (or a potential flag that those policies need to evolve quick). Don’t be gamed.

Build great support with a social option

That’s not to say you shouldn’t use social for support — social can be a great support system but it has to be a preference channel and a part of a larger, working system where the customer can have a good experience via phone, email or in store as well. and it has to be done right as an opportunity for those who chose to use it.

Ideas like individual support reps help avoid flooding your channels with support mentions; peer to peer communities allow for scale while bringing credibility to concerns over product or quality; multi channel support crm makes a continuous, and highly personal experience but most of all, the customer expects the same great response in any other channel.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it

Whether it’s a flier in a newspaper with a Facebook coupon, a tv spot with a Twitter url for a contest or an outright offer to buy fandom with a deep discount (see “Did This National Restaurant Chain Put Too Much Love Into the Like?” by Jay Baer) the result a purchase of a like rather than a connection with a customer. As this sort of buying becomes more common place, it’s not surprising that even as brands talk about wonderful ideas like engaging and building community, research from the Get Satisfaction blog shows that 43.5% of consumers are following brands for offers — and why not, that’s what they’re being told they’ll get.

Already missing the mark on relevancy, social sites penalize poor relevancy

With hundreds of connections per user noise has become so high that systems like Facebook’s EdgeRank now exist to tune down what a user, their friends, and even the overall “like” audience see from a brand page. Even on systems like Twitter that don’t have scoring of responses, the mere amount of information makes the less than relevant disappear into the bottom of a long stream. Thus the more a brand buys it’s following, the less each follower sees, or cares to pay attention to the brand. This becomes a cold reality when you discover that some brands are suppressed to over 80% of their audience.

This doesn’t mean abandoning growth goals, but rather settingt expectations about what they lead too

A brand that decides “I’m going to go out and advertise my page to build up” is wrong to use the word engage to refer to that program. Conversation is gone and while the activity is on a social channel, it is as much broadcast marketing as an email list or a weekly mailer… Even worse with virtually no segmentation offered by social networks, the existing loyal fan base is lumped in with the prospecting effort. Everyone becomes one jumbled mess.

On the other hand, a brand that says let’s insert a flier with orders to share a comment, or posts a sign inside our stores with a mention that you’ll find expert product insights, company updates and occasional offers on their social pages is building the expectation of dialogue and is attracting loyalty and certainly customers. A discount may be associated but the qualification is that you want to be an insider, a participant first, and get a little something in return for it in access and savings.

Bigger counts do not actually mean bigger reach or results

It’s a critical realization and once you step down the paid like road it’s very difficult to get back up the relevancy ladder.

"Regular Friends" bringing Plus into their Facebook network

#1 – Are the features enough to compel people to make a switch?

No one is leaving a trusted tool for less and while circles are a slap in the face of the “optout” site model [heya Facebook], they are just one component. Clearly the site wasn’t built overnight [or if it was they had a heck of a lot of hands on] but it’s not perfect either. Friend circles can be circumvented with sharing, replies have no +1 or other micro interactions, events don’t exist, photo sharing is limit. When there’s an alternative that’s winning, the beta argument doesn’t hold for long.

Features also extend into privacy. Google may have the opt-in method down but with oogles of data, people are going to be wondering where those +1s are going, what a search tells their friends. Privacy is as much a feature as any site widget these days.

#2 – Can they get people in fast enough?

Google’s decision to be Google centric has cost them before and it’s clearly going to be a factor here as well. Rather than clicking an import button and Facebook [or Twitter, LinkedIn, etc] connecting in, users are stuck with a broadcast announcement that they’ve joined. As friend circles catch on auto-discovery will help people find each other but how do they go beyond the early adopters… Google has to find a way to get the technophobes, the indifferent, and even the currently happy users over… and stat.

As the invite hacking and the hype posts [like this one] wither way, there has to be the regular “life, love & work” remarks to keep people logging in. Those are what made Facebook exciting and for the non-tech crowd this is even more true… google gets just a few days with each user before they write it off and return home to see who is dating, vacationing or wants to see a movie.

#3 – Are people willing to multi-post?

This is a dicey one as Google really only gets partial control but it’s huge. When Facebook came into existence it wasn’t always overnight. Some people resisted, a few even held on for years with myspace [and the international sites] owning a few demographic groups even to this day. But what Facebook had was the niche model. One school, one group of people moved at a time and that made it extremely effective as you could literally wake up the day after joining and see all your friends had followed.

Google doesn’t get that ability, not 750 million users later. Every user who joins up has to decide, where do I post, and if 130 of their friends on Facebook we know that gets a vote. That means they have got to find a way to get people cross posting or additional posting and without any integration back or forth, that means a manual visit. It’s not an easy solve but it’s essential as every time someone heads back to see what their “bigger” network said, they risk not deciding to return.

Now since this post already has the distinct smell of doubt, I want to be clear, there’s something very compelling here and I’m hearing it not just from other social / tech / adopters but even from the more passive friends that I’ve snuck over.

It’s no secret that Facebook’s push for open is widely questioned [the “Facebook privacy chain mail” messages say enough]. With that in mind, circles represent a BIG [although by no means new] move and really do change the opportunity for social to be 360. No matter what people say there are lines in life and most of the world either steps back in what they post or who they let in… especially as you age down, and that’s where your powerhouse lies.

Where Google shines is clearly in tackling this and allowing you to combine mom, high school friends, go to vegas with friends, and coworkers into one.

Google also has the benefit of a whole host of tools which many people already use from gchat to gmail to rope in and get really feature rich. But those can hinder too… if they select something “on the shelf” rather than build what people want.

And Google doesn’t have to go “everyone” big, although it seems most logical that they will. Pushing into niches could have a solid outcome & help them avoid having to force a complete change over the short term. But there’s risk in that too… that they become a Twitter – and not in the sense of having huge power but rather having huge awareness but virtually no usage – another wasteland of early adopters who have moved on.

It goes without saying that only time will tell what happens when the “geeks” stop being the majority of users but the way things are rolling, that time will be mighty soon.

Inspirational post: First Night With Google Plus: This is Very Cool from Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web

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…

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.

Instead of waiting for people to come to them these organizations are sending their forces out into conversations to provide value and insights. While companies have been getting involved for years, the scale is changing. In just the past few weeks BestBuy announced their @Twelpforce program to empower an entire sales force to speak one to one with consumers. Hyatt has also made a similar move with @HyattConcierge to respond to travel questions from finding a restaurant to directions like any local Concierge would do. These companies are on the forefront of a powerful opportunity – the chance to influence customers with action, not offers.

This is not to say offer based programs have no value but rather that it’s limited by the interest in following the offers themselves. On the other hand when a company becomes engagement based it moves right into the conversation and whether it’s through twitter, Facebook or a topic based forum, there’s a tremendous opportunity to engage and provide value.

In a sense the entire concept of social solutions is a return to what retail once was. Companies are selling value not in terms of discounts or flashy displays but service. A polite answer to a question no one else solved. A helpful tip about where to go, what to do. It’s all welcomed and warranted so long as the source remains valuable. And while Twitter has introduced the concept on a mass scale it’s possible to extend into literally thousands of micro-communities where answers are always welcomed.

Of course engaging on a companywide level is not without risks and issues. Rogue employees can certainly harm a brand’s reputation intentionally or simply by accident. Plans can be leaked out prematurely and a whole list of other risks could certainly be written up if one was so inclined. But as with so many tactics the risk of inaction is even more worrisome. When a company fails to engage and fails to be open to communication the comments pile up, the questions go unanswered and the brand remains a faceless entity dedicated to selling only.

Opening the doors to mass interaction should be something every organization considers and evaluates. The opportunity for great results exists but must be thought through with careful attention to risks and potential challenges. BestBuy has done a solid job of foreseeing many of these issues and building a plan that works around them just as every organization should. After all the last thing any brand wants is its name getting associated with social spam or any other violations. But with a well executed effort there’s a wide open door to provide value that means something using the hands of people who know the customer and products best.

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.

I know it’s not possible to get enough resources to do everything perfectly but don’t skip one area just to try and make another seem perfect – it won’t work. Instead focus on the big areas of opportunity bit spend some time in the others – court a few bloggers, send a few samples, stay on twitter even if you don’t post a lot, create a facebook page and use it from time to time. This way no matter where someone searches you’re there and as the trends change (and they will change) you’ll already have a foot in that door.