Digital Marketing Specialist, Social Media Consultant,
and Tech Geek at Heart

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The Success of Customer Service is Dependent Upon True Social Engagement

May 19, 2011

With social media now a mainstream activity — after all, nearly 700 million users are on Facebook, 300 million users are on Twitter, 61.4% of global internet users are managing online profiles, and millions of other users are engaging online across thousands of social platforms — it’s imperative that a business have a functional social media plan. Indeed, social media is useful in at least six parts of your company’s functions: sales, marketing & public relations, customer service, research & development, human resources, and executives & management. All in all, it sounds really lovely. Businesses pounce on the opportunity to integrate social media plans in their regular activities, but in many cases, they fall short.

If You Don’t Execute, You’re a Failure

As of late, I realize that social media interaction is merely a false front for a lot of companies to show that they care. Consumerist recently highlighted findings that showed that companies are hiring social media folks (both internally and externally) to listen in social channels for complaints, reply to the consumer feigning concern, and drop the matter entirely. The idea is that if you can get unhappy customers to STFU (at least in the public realm), you’ve done your job because the customer likely is now going to stop campaigning for attention publicly and your company looks like they’ve been proactive.

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Connection: Social Media’s Special Gift

January 26, 2011

When the Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 1999, it signaled a paradigm shift: markets are conversations. Today, the online space and affordability of web hosting and domain names has helped create billions of conversations about your brand, your industry, and critical key players in your space.

It’s up to you to capitalize this and leverage it effectively.

I asked a big brand on Twitter for help and they gave me a canned response. I miss the days when social media was more personalized.

A big US brand with over 100,000 Twitter followers has run into the problem that I tweeted about above. To this well-known retailer, social media has become just one channel of many where they need to offer customer service without any care in the world for the people they’re engaging with. This thinking unfortunately minimizes the potential of true and far reaching social media strategy, creating the ability to truly connect with people and build bonds with constituents that can help them evangelize your brand and create passionate advocates.

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Social Media Strategy from A to Z

May 28, 2010

Social media might be old. It might even be a dead buzzword. That’s why you need to paint a picture that’s more meaningful and encompasses what “social media” as a label really is.

Some of us have been thrust into social media simply because the online landscape showed potential for online conversations. Others have been there for over a decade. Regardless of the many years of experience you have in the online space, the ideas behind social media and social media marketing are applicable to everyone. Let’s take a look at some lessons, takeaways, and tips.

Always be Listening. Social media rocks because it’s one of the most amazing tools for “free” market research. Your investment is merely that of time. Take the time to hear what people are saying about your business. If you’re the frugal type, take advantage of the free alerts from Google, YackTrack, Social Mention, BackType (which gives you alerts from blog/article comments, which other services do not include), and Trackur.

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Apple Gets More Serious About Using Twitter, but Why it Doesn’t Matter

October 22, 2009

Apple, the company behind aesthetically pleasing hardware that keeps fanboys drooling, has recently joined Twitter. If you take a look at any one of their four accounts, you’ll notice one thing: they’re not using Twitter to converse but to broadcast. Effectively, they’re porting their press release information to the wide open, and perhaps going a little more granular by featuring content specific to elements of iTunes.

itunesmusicsmallFirst, I’m going to say kudos to Apple for trying involve themselves in the world of social media. I’m going to stop there, though. Unfortunately, they still don’t quite “get it.” Let’s envision this scenario: a user has a support issue about an Apple product. If it was a Comcast product, you’d get a near immediate response from Frank Eliason, the company’s Director of Digital Care. Apple has no such protocol in place, and at this point, there is no engagement. If you used Twitter to direct a complaint to iTunes, if and only if they bother to monitor and respond to their replies, they would send you to their faceless and non-responsive customer support channel.

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Why Customer Service Should Be in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

July 21, 2009

If you’re reading this article, it should be clear to you that people use social media — like this very blog post — as a way to broadcast their thoughts and feelings, be them positive or negative. Blogs can also convey information, share ideas, and chronicle important lifetime milestones. In today’s day and age, it is incredibly easy for a person to set up his personal web space to start sharing whatever is on his mind (and you begin to wonder why Twitter’s growth is so huge and popular among celebrities?)

With social media — or quite frankly, the existence of the Internet, any misstep you make in your personal dealings with others can become public. And this is why customer service is incredibly important, even if the customer service dealings are entirely handled offline.

Social media is social.

It’s easy for people to tweet about bank robberies and to photograph live displays of computer errors in public places. Do you think it’s harder for people to rant about your screw-ups?

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