Customer Service

Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 2)

June 27, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Part 2: Social Networks, Communities, Aggregators and Wikis

The third social media space where you will find your customers are social networks. These range from public networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to private branded networks. You need to understand if your customers are actively engaged in these networks, and participate accordingly.

The easiest way to understand LinkedIn and Facebook is to understand their roots. LinkedIn started as a way for business professionals to connect with each other through mutual connections. Facebook, as the name implies, was the Internet version of the ubiquitous college facebook. Although it started as a closed network for college and high school students, it’s been open to the general public since 2007 and really exploded that spring. Both networks offer numerous interactive features and interest groups in which members can collect around shared interests.

Flickr, YouTube and similar networks are more specific to a certain type of interest; Flickr is photography, YouTube is for video clips, and so on. Conversation happens but it is about the photo, about the video clip.

For the most part, though, these public social networks are more enablers of conversation and community than places where folks “hang out” for any length of time. In my opinion, they have a flatness that stems from their primary role as conveyers of information. However, you need to understand how your customers are participating in these spaces. Some Facebook and LinkedIn groups are very active; if your customers happen to have joined together in one, you should be aware and act accordingly.

Private branded communities, enabled by social software like Ning, let anyone build a community around a set of shared interests.

Companies may also launch their own communities using enterprise-level software. For example, Saturn recently launched a community that exceeded its six-month estimate of signups in the first three weeks.

When these communities succeed, whether consumer-driven or company supported, the conversation and engagement level is generally quite high because the distraction factor of other interests is absent.

Some of the other social media tools and terms you may hear of:

Aggregators or memetrackers like Memeorandum and Tailrank collect the most linked/talked about posts of the day and present them in a threaded format – the original post and the follow-on ones so you can follow the online conversation. Another news aggregator site is Digg, which uses a voting system to promote articles to the front page.
Wikis are simply websites edited by a group versus an individual using specialized software that tracks changes, updates and access rights. The best known public wiki is Wikipedia but increasingly wikis are used by companies for internal project management and support knowledge bases. You will often find them built into online communities.
Podcasts and videocasts are online radio or video shows. They are typically pre-recorded. Unlike streaming audio or video, listeners/viewers can download the show to their computer or a portable device like an iPod and listen or watch whenever they want. Users can also sign up for regular updates.

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In part 3, we’ll discuss the impact of social media on customer care. If you’d like to read more about customer service issues, please check out my client Caras Training’s blog For the Face of Your Business. Principal Ronna Caras has been focusing on customer service of late, and I think you’ll enjoy her perspective. I certainly do!

Tags: blogs, social media, customer relations, customer satisfaction

Blogging & social media: What customer service professionals should know, and do, about it (Part 1)

June 26, 2008 by Susan Getgood

This article is based on a workshop I delivered at the SOCAP International Symposium in April.

Part 1- Defining Social Media: Blogs & Microblogs

Customer service. It’s the new marketing.

Huh? Anyone who has been in business for more than five minutes knows that customer service has always been part of marketing. The scale of the modern enterprise and the realities of distribution may have separated them functionally, but practically, a customer’s experience with our product is just as, if not more, important than any ad, promotion or package.

Ah, but it’s different now. Customer satisfaction is more important than ever. Research conducted by global think tank Society for New Communications Research in Spring 2008 reported that 72 percent of respondents researched products and services online, and 84 percent considered the customer care reputation of the company when making a purchase decision.

Where are consumers finding this information? Not on your corporate website. Increasingly, they are turning to social media like blogs to both share their opinions and find out what others think. In the SNCR study, search engines, online rating systems, discussion forums and blogs were all considered more valuable sources of information than the company website.

Source: Society for New Communications Research, Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media

Social media is a collective term used to refer to a variety of online tools including blogs, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and online consumer forums. This article will give you a brief overview of the ones most important for customer service and satisfaction. The key thing about all of them is that they give consumers a way to communicate with each other, fast. Faster than sometimes the company can respond. As customer service and consumer affairs professionals, you need to understand which ones your customers are using, and develop strategies to use those same tools to improve your service and satisfaction.

We’re going to focus on the tools most relevant to customer service: blogs, microblogs and social networks.

Technically, blogs are simply websites developed using a lightweight content management system (CMS). They use HTML, just like your company website, but the CMS tools are designed to be simple to use for people without technical knowledge. Well known CMS include Typepad, Blogger, Movable Type and Word Press.

The things that most clearly identify a site as a blog are:

Content, or posts, presented in an article-like form, in reverse chronological order.
Ability for readers to leave public comments
Ability to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed or by email

In practice, however, blogs are much more than that. Unlike your company website, which is probably a fairly static presentation of company capabilities not that different from a brochure, blogs are a conversation. Bloggers write about and link to other bloggers’ ideas. They create space on their blog for readers to comment, and they reply back. This dynamic is why news can spread so very fast from blog to blog.

Blogs typically have a point of view and they are not overtly commercial or promotional, even if they are a company or product blog. It’s all about engaging in a conversation in an authentic, honest way.

The easiest way to understand microblogs – services like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce – is to think of them as group instant messaging. It’s real-time one-to-many; unlike instant messaging, when you post a public message, everyone in your network can see and respond to it. The most popular service is Twitter, and companies like JetBlue, Comcast, Dell and online shoe store Zappos are already using it to communicate with customers.

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In part two, we’ll look at social networks and communities.

Tags: customer service, customer satisfaction, blogs

The direction of Marketing Roadmaps

May 28, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Marketing Roadmaps has been going in a new direction for the past couple months, so I thought it would be a good time to articulate what you can expect to find here. And what you most likely will not find here.

First off — what you will find here. More on the practice of blogger relations, the impact of social media on customer care, practical tips culled from my workshops on social media and blogger relations. Conversation about online reputation management, measuring the return on investment, online communities and the impact of social media on traditional entertainment.

What you won’t find so much of? Sales process and marketing management tips. I’ll be writing and talking about those on Business Forward, the blog and podcast I produce for my client GuideMark. Too much talk about my family, pets, trips and favorite tv shows, unless there’s a marketing angle. All of that you’ll find at my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles.

You also won’t find too much discussion of the practice of public relations, as distinct from blogger relations, unless it is something really juicy like blacklists or gross unethical behavior by a top PR agency that I just cannot resist.

I especially will not be talking about the social media press release. For me to comment on the press release, as a form, in any form, at this point is like a vegetarian recommending a cut of beef. As my practice moves away from pureplay public relations, and toward blogger relations and online reputation management, I find that just about the last thing I recommend to clients is a press release. It’s just not relevant to what they are trying to achieve, which is to talk with their customers online.

Wait a minute, I hear you cry. Over the past few years, many marketing and PR consultants have recommended online distribution of releases through services like PR Web as a way to reach customers directly. By putting the release on the wire, the story goes, you improve the discoverability of your news by the search engines. Well, yes. But the operative word is NEWS. If you are issuing actual company news or material information, and you need to reach the news media, by all means do a news release, in whatever form floats your boat — traditional, social media, tom-tom drum. Whatever.

But if it isn’t actually news, as in new and interesting, it shouldn’t be distributed as news. I attribute most of the press release crap lining my spam folder to the mistaken notion that using the form of the press release somehow transforms mundane sales pitches into page one material.

If you are trying to reach your customers, the news release is not and and never has been the optimum form. Telephone. Newsletters. Email blast to your customer list. Personal email. Blogs. All of these are better, more easily understood ways to convey information about your products and services to your customers. Including bloggers.

So take it away, Todd Defren, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski. I’ll come over and comment at your places, but as far as Marketing Roadmaps goes, I’ve said what I’m going to say, I’ve said it again, and now I’ve said it for the last time.

Instead, I’m going to focus on helping companies meet their customers online.

Peace out.

Tags: social media press release, blogger relations, customer relations