Start your social media efforts with good customer service

Andrew Grill of MarCom Professional has written this long-overdue article about the importance of perfecting your customer service in this age of social media. View it in its original context here or scroll down…

—-

This article first appeared in the PointZero magazine, issue 2 October 2009.

It is often said that marketing helps consumers decide which product they should buy, and the customer service and operations department of any company is where this work can come undone in a flash.

As rightly identified by Dave Evans in a recent post titled “Social Business: the New Black”

Marketing sets the expectation, marketing creates demand, marketing helps a consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice.

Operations delivers.

Any gap between the two drives a conversation on the social Web.

Hence the title of this article: “Mind the (social media) gap”.

Social media is going mainstream, giving customers a voice like never before, and if there is a huge gap between the marketing promise and the actual service delivered then the whole world will know about it as a result of just one angry tweet.  This gap is something that is driving conversations online in a way that was not even conceivable just a few years ago.

A good example of this is the now infamous “United breaks guitars” incident, where Dave Carroll watched helplessly as his guitar was broken by United airlines ground staff, and in turn United looked on as $180 million was wiped off their stock price almost instantly as the story spread around the world.

Companies need to understand that they no longer have control of their brand – all they can hope to do is to manage how other people treat it by using the power of social media.

It could be argued that companies need to invest more heavily in the tools, people and processes to monitor, measure and manage what is being said about their products online, than is spent on advertising the product in the first place.

You wouldn’t interrupt a conversation with an ad would you?

Companies wanting to “advertise” in social media channels don’t get that this is the old way of doing things – driven by 50 years of a broadcast mindset where companies decide the messages they wanted to project.  Advertisers still assume that consumers will receive and act on these messages in just the way they planned.  Social media is proving that this is no longer the case.

In the last few years with blogs, Facebook, and now Twitter emerging, this way of thinking by advertisers is likely to disappear altogether.  Peer advocacy is taking hold, and consumers are now turning to their real, or online “friends” for advice on products and services.

This means that it is more important than ever for companies to actively listen to these new social channels for mentions (both positive and negative) of their brand – and act accordingly.

In the old PR world, identifying the “influencers” was a matter of having a decent journalist and analyst Rolodex.  Today though, almost anyone armed with a blog or twitter account becomes as important to a brand as journalists once were.

The impact of poor customer service can not only completely undermine the latest marketing campaign, but as was seen with United, wipe millions off the value of an entire company.

My advice to companies looking at investing in social media is to actually start with the customer facing areas first – operations, support & customer service.  Interaction by consumers with these areas of the company will drive most of the “noise” online – much more than any new marketing campaign.

Sadly, most companies starting out with social media seem to be focusing their efforts on PR (an extension of existing clipping services) or marketing – trying to understand the impact of social media on “their “ brand.  What they don’t realise is that the operational areas of a company are where most of the customer interaction is taking place – and this is where the initial efforts with social media are likely to bear the most fruit.

Step one for any company wanting to dip a toe into social media is to listen.  There are a number of free tools that allow companies to start to listen to what is being said about them online.  A good place to start would be to type the company name or one of their major brands into the Twitter search engine at search.twittter.com. Other free tools such as socialmention.com will provide an indication of the urgency behind developing a strategy to cope with these new channels.

Free tools are a good “social thermometer” to take a brand’s temperature online, but to get serious, companies need to invest in paid tools that allow a deep level of analysis and workflow management to be incorporated into existing processes.  Companies such a Visible Technologies, Techrigy, Buzzmetrics and Radian6 provide enterprise grade solutions for listening, and identifying conversations and then engaging in a positive and meaningful way.

The steps to mind the social media gap can be summarised as:

LISTEN > LEARN > ENGAGE > INTEGRATE

LISTEN – Identify passionate and authentic brand influencers and activists:

• Is anyone online actually having conversations about my brand, product or service?
• What are they discussing?
• Is what they are saying good, bad or indifferent?
• Who are these people having these conversations? Are they influential?
• Where do they tend to congregate?

LEARN – Assess conversation volume about your brand, find audiences who care about your offerings, uncover new business opportunities:

• What is driving conversation of my brand?
• What are the perceived characteristics of my brand and my competitor’s brands?
• What are the opportunities to improve brand perception?

ENGAGE – Participate in conversations about your brand and engage influencers and advocates:

• Your product advocates are levers for your success
• Arm them with information, reward them for their loyalty and respect them by considering their input and using it
• Give advocates some recognition, and value and measure their impact
• Detractors need and deserve respect as well – you may be able to convert them to an advocate by engaging directly with them

INTEGRATE – Enhance your existing operational and marketing strategies to take advantage of this new and real-time communications channel between brands and consumers.  Existing measurement metrics need to be expanded to include:

• Brand buzz: Who’s talking about your brand right now and what’s the tone?
• Influence: Are complaints or praises coming from isolated individuals or people with a huge following and hence influence?
• Reach: How far are your messages spreading?
• Virality: What is the speed at which a conversation moves throughout the social media ecosystem?

Social media has provided consumers with the tools and a platform to have their opinions heard and acted upon like never before.  Brands need to ensure they have adequate resources to join the conversation, while minding the gap between the promise offered by marketing, and the service delivered by the operations and customer support teams.

—-

What do you think? If you have ventured onto social media, which brands are you following/friending, and why do you like them? Which have not impressed you?

Assume your website readers are smiling

Are you stuck trying to come up with an appropriate tone for your blog or website? MarCom Professional’s blogger and psychologist Graham Jones has a suggestion: write as if your audience are smiling.  Intrigued? Click here to read the article on the MarCom Professional site or scroll down.

—-

Your website’s readers pose a real problem for you. Even though you might know their needs and interests well, even though you may have done loads of market research and analytics, the fact remains you cannot see them. And that means you cannot judge their response to what you are saying in your blog posts and articles.

Imagine your website readers are smiling so that your blog becomes more engaging

New research from Amsterdam suggests this could have important implications for the style of writing you adopt online. It seems that when we are face-to-face with someone who is smiling we use more descriptive and interpretive language. When we are talking to someone with more negative facial expressions we become factual and rather boring. Furthermore, the language we choose seems to be based entirely on the facial expressions of our audience – it is not affected by our own mood.

What we also know is that stories and more descriptive language is more “connective”; people engage more with this kind of language and story tellers can be inspiring leaders. Online, though, we cannot see the reaction of our readers. Hence you will find that much material on web pages is factual – and frankly – boring.

That’s probably because our lack of non-verbal feedback from our audience makes us assume they are straight-faced, with no real facial expression one way or the other. In turn, this probably means our language becomes less expressive and rather straight itself. Indeed, it is a common problem with all business communication.

For some unknown reason, business language is stilted and factual, rather than descriptive and expressive. When you peek inside many boardrooms, you find lots of people not smiling, but rather expression-less, fearing that any show of emotion would be some indication of weakness. Of course, look at successful business people, like Richard Branson or Theo Paphitis and you find them smiling all the time. And when people smile, we tend to smile back. The result is the language of these business leaders is not business-like – both of them use expressive, descriptive language. And that’s partly because their audiences are smiling back at them, this new research suggests.

If your website is full of factual, straight and non-descriptive language you will not be behaving like these successful individuals. Your website will be just like all the rest – trying to be business-like and failing to connect as a result.

To really connect with your audience you need description, stories and expressive, emotive language. And this new Dutch study points to the fact that you only do that when the people you are talking to are smiling. Because you can’t see your online audience, there is only one way out of this – assume your readers are smiling.

Indeed, the best advice I was ever given when starting my writing career, was “get a picture of one individual in your mind and write for that single person”. If you do that you can see them smiling and in turn your language will boost your website. When I wrote this for you, I knew you were smiling all the way through. Thanks.

—-

What do you think? Have you seen websites that are written as if their readers are smiling? Tell us about them here!

Google Insights

Here’s an interesting study from MarCom Professional’s Stephen Waddington, exploring the potential in a new Google tool called ‘Insights’.  Read it in context here, or scroll down…

—-

Like Andrew Smith I’ve been tinkering with Google Insights this week since Google added a predictive feature. I wanted to explore how good the new feature is and whether it could be used as an aide to PR planning.

Google Insights for Search couldn’t be simpler to use. Punch in a keyword string, select four filter options (reach, region, data and categories) from a drop down menu and hit search. You can add up to five comparative searches.

A graph showing the popularity of the searche term over time is returned – and assuming Google has a sufficient amount of data a prediction for the likely number of searches for the next 18 months is shown.

The numbers displayed are normalised, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. But if you use a Google account you can access more detailed data and additional information such as heat maps, rising searches and top searches.

Here are some of the search terms that I’ve explored along with some conclusions. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

What’s the outlook for the “newspaper” industry

The graph shows that searches for the keyword “newspaper” have been in decline worldwide since 2004, reflecting the state of the industry. Google predicts that this downward trend is set to continue through 2010.

And the “public relations” industry?

Searches for the keyword string “public relations” show a similar pattern to the newspaper publishing industry. More evidence of the the fragmentation of the PR industry and the rise of digital.

Predicting “Christmas”

Searches for “Christmas” peak at the end of each year but it looks as if there is insufficient data for Google’s algorithm to recognise this as a recuring annual event.

When are we likely to see the end of the “downturn” in the UK?

This search was conducted solely on UK data. According to Google the first significant rise in the search term “downturn” was October 2o07 and it peaked in January 2009. There’s insufficient data for Google’s algorithm to deliver a prediction for when searches on downturn might reach a low but March or April 2010 looks likely.

And finally, what’s the political outlook in the UK?

This search examined the search frequency of “Gordon Brown” vs ” David Cameron” vs “UK election”. There is no real conclusion to be drawn unless you want to make something of Google being unsure of the future trend for searches on “Gordon Brown”.

—-

What do you think? Have you tried this tool? What results were particularly interesting, or funny? Share them here!

Are you too friendly with your customers?

Here’s another helpful article from Graham Jones at MarCom Professional.  You can find it in its original state on their website by clicking here.

You must keep your customers at arm’s length online

Customers shouldn’t become your friends in places like Facebook. That’s the conclusion you can draw from new research from the University of Pennsylvania which looked at the whole basis for friendship. When we see people as true friends, we appear to change the way we relate to the individuals. The research shows that we engage with them without any need for anything in return.

If you become friends with your customers your brain will make it less likely that you will seek something from them in return for the relationship. In other words, if your customers become your online friends there’s a danger you won’t make as much money out of them when compared with keeping them at arm’s length.

The new study turns on its head what social psychologists have thought of friendship. For years, one of the reasons for the existence of the concept of friendship was thought to be trade. We need to have friendly contacts in order for society to work.

But this new research shows that the reason for friendship is to surround ourselves with people who will help us in times of conflict. It was previously thought that friendship always involved some kind of “exchange” between the partners in a relationship. But this new study shows that close friends are treated differently – we are happy to be friends with people who we feel will look after us and care for us and we are prepared to receive nothing in return.

One of the reasons that people use online social networks is to extend and deepen existing relationships. If you do that with your customers there’s a chance you will become much closer and thereby be happy for their friendship even if you get nothing in return. Clearly getting close to your customers is a good idea; but this new research shows there is a potential danger in getting too close.

—–

What do you think about this? Where do you draw the line between good ‘working relationship’ and just good relationship? Leave comments here if you have any ideas!