Eh…What's up, doc? Group response that isn't looney
By: Lauren Vargas
The Internet has given new meaning to several words, including carrots. Prior to social media engagement, I thought of carrots as the bitter vegetable my mother attempted to feed me at dinner or the image of Bugs Bunny’s chewing nonchalantly on a carrot. Not any longer, folks! Enter the Twitter sig…
This month we are tackling internal training and the importance of an educated workforce as the cornerstone for effective external engagement. Individual voices and personalities can be celebrated and thrive if everyone has a defined safe haven to operate. Transparency to the external community is key for healthy dialog, but don’t underestimate the importance of transparency between departments in your own organization. The policies and processes formed as you integrate social media into your overall business are primarily created to promote internal communication. The buck has to stop somewhere.
Despite having multiple people behind our Twitter handle from the beginning, in a small company and tight-knit social media community, we did not identify who was speaking from behind the company handle with each tweet because it was assumed everyone knew us. As our company and the conversations have grown, we have lost some of this internal and external familiarity.
To retain organizational accountability, help manage workflow, and spearhead a scalable listening grid, Radian6 has started using Twitter sigs (i.e., carrots – ^LV) in response to issues or customer service questions requiring a personal touch. We are trialing this method of engagement to see if it improves external awareness and internal knowledge of who is responding and when/why they are engaging. A playbook is divine for communicating the essence of procedure, but there is nothing better than seeing, engaging and being accountable for the participation.
Is identifying the people behind the avatar in the bio enough? How do you identify the people behind the avatar? Does this accountability matter to your community?
What do you think about Radian6 using Twitter sigs?
I was so excited to see R6 start using this Twitter sig strategy recently! I work in an agency setting where we offer social CRM solutions for our clients. As some of our clients are very large with very large volume we have some very specific needs. One topic profile we use has 10-12,000 posts/month. We needed a scalable strategy to handle the volume. We started with multiple twitter handles and found this to be very difficult to manage (load balancing, routing, customers not knowing who to tweet to, etc. …it just got messy & confusing). So, we now have one "care/support" twitter handle with a team 13 of "engagers" or "responders." The beauty of the R6 Engagement Console is that multiple users can be logged in with their unique credentials, but they all can have the same twitter accounts configured (and then sign the tweets for accountability purposes!). So, here is our strategy:
-Multiple engagers/agents are logged into the EC
-All agents configure the same care twitter handles to their EC
-The agents can simultaneously tweet from the same Twitter handles!
-If volume gets heavy the "lead" agent will assign posts to fellow team members so that they can work the posts faster
-For example, say there are 100 posts requiring engagement in the “My Tasks” stack, the lead agent may assign 25 to 3 team members leaving 25 for themself. They all work 25 posts each, thus knocking them out much faster than if just one person was trying to chip away at the 100 posts. This is great that are able to have faster response times.
-Each agent signs each tweet with the caret + initial (^LM). We have found this to be beneficial since having a team that is continually growing (started with 2 agents, now up to 13) we have an increasing need for agent accountability among team members.
I'd be very interested in learning how other companies and brands are managing social CRM. Please share!
My only suggestion/feature request to R6 would be to have an auto-signing feature that could be toggled on/off since sometimes agents forget to sign the tweets.
I was so excited to see R6 start using this Twitter sig strategy recently! I work in an agency setting where we offer social CRM solutions for our clients. As some of our clients are very large with very large volume we have some very specific needs. One topic profile we use has 10-12,000 posts/month. We needed a scalable strategy to handle the volume. We started with multiple twitter handles and found this to be very difficult to manage (load balancing, routing, customers not knowing who to tweet to, etc. …it just got messy & confusing). So, we now have one "care/support" twitter handle with a team 13 of "engagers" or "responders." The beauty of the R6 Engagement Console is that multiple users can be logged in with their unique credentials, but they all can have the same twitter accounts configured (and then sign the tweets for accountability purposes!). So, here is our strategy:
-Multiple engagers/agents are logged into the EC
-All agents configure the same care twitter handles to their EC
-The agents can simultaneously tweet from the same Twitter handles!
-If volume gets heavy the "lead" agent will assign posts to fellow team members so that they can work the posts faster
-For example, say there are 100 posts requiring engagement in the “My Tasks” stack, the lead agent may assign 25 to 3 team members leaving 25 for themself. They all work 25 posts each, thus knocking them out much faster than if just one person was trying to chip away at the 100 posts. This is great that are able to have faster response times.
-Each agent signs each tweet with the caret + initial (^LM). We have found this to be beneficial since having a team that is continually growing (started with 2 agents, now up to 13) we have an increasing need for agent accountability among team members.
I'd be very interested in learning how other companies and brands are managing social CRM. Please share!
My only suggestion/feature request to R6 would be to have an auto-signing feature that could be toggled on/off since sometimes agents forget to sign the tweets.