People are increasingly expressing their brand wants and needs online. Radian6′s platform connects organizations with these conversations and produces fantastic results, from shedding positive light on your brand to generating sales leads.

Watch this video and find out how your business can meet clients at their point of need.

Even before social media, family vacations were a lot of fun when I was a little girl. One of the ways I remembered my trips and archived their special moments was through scrapbooking. Not the new-fangled-way of scrapbooking, with embellishments and ornate stickers, but the good old fashioned slap-something-on-that-manila-page and call it done kind. I collected brochures of the places we visited, snapped pictures to be processed when we returned home, and collected little pieces of memorabilia that fit nicely between my pages – and I shared the book with guests who came to visit.

Social Media Scrapbooking

While many people still scrapbook today, even more are sharing their adventures electronically. You probably remember the early days of digital photos and email, and that friend who always tried to email, large download-limit-breaking, photos to you of beaches and theme parks. Now, social media has made photo sharing much easier. Travelers are embracing the variety of options at their fingertips to share their pictures and stories across the social web.

Sure, the average guest at your resort may not be a professional photographer, and they may not be a “travel industry influencer” across social media channels, but they’re posting images of sunsets, landscapes and beach-time fun. They’re already broadcasting their good times about you, and your business, and you didn’t even have to ask.

How You Can Use These Unsolicited Social Media Shares To Grow Your Travel Business

Certainly, some friends and followers of social media loving travelers may limit themselves to vicarious living, but others are paying close attention. On one occasion, I recall being so captivated with the snapshot of a beach my friend had posted on Facebook – I made it my screensaver. Months later, I asked her to remind me where the photo was taken. She excitedly shared every detail of her stay at The Fairmont Southampton in Bermuda, right down to the patio she was sitting on as she snapped it from her iPhone. Though, I haven’t made it to Bermuda yet, her travels now fill a book of must-see destinations I otherwise would have never known about.

How you can leverage social sharing:

• Create an environment or even a distraction from the norm. Maybe you don’t have Cinderella’s Castle for the background shot like Disney does, that’s alright. Search for something iconic and make sure you point it out as the perfect picture opportunity. Guests are already showcasing your property, so come up with something clever that will generate plenty of discussion and will create a connection to your brand when people see multiple images popping up across the social web.
• Have a monitoring platform, and a strategy, that includes coverage of shared media – such as videos and images. Be on the lookout for the organic images your guests share.
• Be present and involved in online communities, where sharing is fun and easy. Create accounts on video and photo sites built for easy sharing like Flickr, YouTube and even Facebook. Encourage your guests to share their images and videos with you across these social platforms. Then, reward them for being part of your unofficial PR team with points, coupons, bonuses, etc. – you get the picture!
• Talk about their experiences with them. Engage them in conversation across the social channels they frequent, such as Twitter. Your guests tell the story of staying with you, or visiting you more authentically than any brochure will. Let them help point people in your direction.

At the end of the day (or the end of their stay), your guests are going to share what moves them, what inspires them and what makes their vacation enjoyable. Travelers haven’t changed much, despite the change in media – they still love to share their travel experiences. Though the sharing is primarily electronic now, brochures are the equivalent of links back to your location, and personalized pictures with the smiling faces of friends set the stage to draw more new friends to your destination – it’s still up to you to provide the compelling experiences and surroundings. Once you’ve got that covered, then you can leave the electronic scrapbooking up to your guests.

Discussion: Have you visited a location because of social media shared content from friends, colleagues or family? Do you have a story about how photo-sharing online, drew new business to your destination?

On a lighter note: For those of you who like to get creative with photography on your travels. Check out this great travel photography flickr group and the 10 best travel photography websites for inspiration!

Jenn Seeley is a Community Engagement Specialist who travels vicariously through the many bloggers, tweeple and travel aficionados she engages with on a daily basis. Tweet your travel & social media stories with her at @jenn_seeley!

Digital. Engagement. Social. Proactive Customer Service. The list goes on. Many buzz words are circulating at the moment, and companies are under pressure, more so than ever, to be present on social networks. Have you caught yourself in the last little while saying or at least thinking ‘Well I tweeted insert brand an hour ago and they STILL haven’t replied’. Exactly. There’s no question about it, online engagement is important. However, how much presence and engagement strikes the right balance? When is the right time to bow out gracefully or exit a conversation? These questions are important because you could quite literally be at it for hours thanking, double thanking, and triple thanking everyone for every mention and @ reply.

@ The Whole Organization

Online engagement could be the result of a whole host of reasons with benefits that will cut across the enterprise. Whether you are launching a social media campaign and tracking its performance, handling a PR disaster, building a community or just simply providing another avenue for customer service a subject Guy Stephens a resident expert on Social Customer Service blogs about extensively, some of the basics will remain constant. You will likely want to encourage promoters and on the other hand address detractors, setbacks or complaints. However, when do you stop and is there such a thing as over-engaging?

Let’s start with vocal detractors. Regardless of whether in our personal or our professional lives we’ve most likely all had a disagreement or two at some point. The same goes for brands, and while we may well feel that the customer is always right, or within their right, there are numerous ways addressing a particular issue can play out. The last thing a company wants is bad press or for something to go viral. In some instances a helpful brand might simply never satisfy a disgruntled customer and every attempt made at a resolution remains futile. These cases occur but they are usually not the norm and Jason Falls has some great thoughts on the subject as well.

Before you turn your back you want to ensure that if someone has a concern which they have voiced online, that first and foremost you have acknowledged the issue and explored the issue fully. Taking the high road will almost certainly only be appropriate as a last resort, so in the first instance you’ll need to ensure that you are listening to online conversations and following up with any inquiries or complaints. In many cases a simple usability question can be resolved, in other cases it may take a little bit longer and require some internal changes and realignment. For the latter it tends to be more fruitful to steer the conversation offline to allow for a more comprehensive exchange on the issue. This does not mean that you neglect any online engagement however, and similarly as you wouldn’t simply hang up the phone, you don’t want to leave someone hanging online. Finally, as is always the case with service issues ultimately they can help make your company or organization better so addressing and taking action on prompted or unprompted feedback is key.

Think It Through

When it comes to engagement, action and speaking (tweeting/ blogging etc) can be interchangeable. Corporate social media in its infancy has been the stage for some quite appalling examples of companies lashing out at their customers online. As a result, even satisfied customers may witness such behavior and think twice about doing business with the company. In some cases lashing out may not be vocal but take on different forms, censorship, for example. Some companies have attempted to mute negative conversations about them by attempting to delete posts or comments. Again this is counterproductive and a proper outreach strategy should be explored and implemented rather than a counterproductive quick fix. If an incident does go viral, the most appropriate solution may not be to engage with each individual but rather posting a public letter of acknowledgment/or apology may help to pacify the crowds.

Guidelines and policies can be a helpful way for companies to set the standard for engagement, and equally important, when not to engage. Training similarly is key, as well as ensuring that staff are well equipped to represent the company publicly. However, and possibly above all, the same professionalism, courtesy and manners which apply in the ‘real world’ should apply to the online world. Ultimately, over-engagement likely isn’t a problem, it is more about routing conversations appropriately, ticking the right boxes as and when appropriate and ensuring you’ve crossed all of your T’s before you close off any conversation.

How do you deal with promoters and detractors online? Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with us, we’d love to hear them.

Imagine this: a customer walks into your national retail clothing store looking for a particular pair of shoes. Your salesclerk realizes the store doesn’t have them, and neither do any of your satellite stores. Your competitor, however, does. So, she purchases them for her customer, and has them delivered to her house on your dime.

Or this: a customer has scoured most of North America for an Armani tux to no avail. Your salesman sources said suit within a day, dispatches someone to haul it off a delivery truck, and even has it altered for the understandably elated customer. The kicker? While you are a high end clothing store, you don’t sell Armani.

The company we’re talking about actually exists – the American clothing store Nordstrom’s. It’s well known in the business world that Nordstrom’s employs some killer customer service, and has for decades, including thank you cards (before anyone else was doing it) and free home delivery. These anecdotes about Nordstrom’s are legendary, and since the company prides itself on discretion, we’ll never *really* know for sure if they actually occurred. What we do know however, is that over the years the chain has become 100% synonymous with customer service. And most of that reputation has been built through word of mouth.

Top notch customer service is rapidly becoming the key thing that separates the men from the boys in organizations large and small. And with social media platforms playing a key role these days in every aspect of marketing, sales, customer service and community growth, it pays to remember that customers are individuals. So how do you scale the power of the social web to ensure better results and a more ‘human’ response that reflects the people who make up your community?

At Radian6‘s inaugural user conference, Social 2011, the panel How to Scale ‘A Person like Me’ will explore just that. Featuring Brent Leary, co-founder and partner at CRM Essentials; Tara Roberts, Vice President, Social CRM Applications at Oracle; Esteban Kolsky, Principal and Founder of ThinkJar LLC; and Tom Divittorio, Director, Platform Solutions Architecture with Salesforce, these four customer service leaders are going to address some simple yet important ways your company can be a good citizen of your community, such as:

• How to really listen to your customers and quickly address problems while providing feedback.
• Why hiring the best people or sourcing those within your company with the appropriate skill set for social media is so vitally important.
• And what you can do to keep engagement natural and effective, even while employing the latest in social media analysis technology.

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review might have said it best, “…companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.”

What do you think? Are you making your online community a key facet of your business strategy? What questions would you like to ask our panelists? As always, we value your contributions.

When we as businesses start or continue the discussion around the value of social media, inevitably the question comes up about sales. Can we sell in social media? Can the value in social media be translated to the cash register or the actual bottom line?

The simple answer is yes.

The more nuanced – and more important – answer is yes…but.

Sales and social media can work together. You can find prospects, talk with prospects, provide information.

The trick is that social media is rarely, if ever, the direct sales channel itself. Social media can increase the likelihood of sales through better targeting, more consistent touchpoints and availability of information, establishing affinities and relationships and all of the things that support the eventual transaction. Those are the same things we would want to do offline to nurture our prospects, but now we have more online channels to bridge those connections in both places.

Yet we’re so impatient to take the platforms social media provides and make them the direct marketing and revenue channel. But it’s not so easy.

Take something like Dell Outlet (disclosure: they’re a customer)? That’s an oft-cited example of empirical proof that social media can be a sales channel since the company reports millions of dollars in sales through that Twitter channel alone. But here’s an important qualification for that.

Dell spent not just months but years building their reputation, addressing customer concerns, offering up feedback channels, listening, participating, and contributing long before they ever made social media channels into a sales vehicle. They invested in their social media presence for a great deal of time – likely without much in the way of easily quantifiable dollar return – and saw the value in all of that first. They not only addressed the concerns and conversations happening within their community, but they spent time shoring up their website and e-commerce experience, providing lots of channels for discussion and feedback, listening and responding, all designed to enhance the journey toward the transaction rather than trying to be the destination.

Dell Outlet works because it’s been and continues to be buttressed by countless people, resources, and information that make it a single trusted channel among an ecosystem of investment in a community. But it’s really unlikely that you can replicate that singular piece with any success until you’re willing to methodically and patiently invest in the rest.

Instead, consider social media as the supporting cast for the sales process, and a way to enhance your prospects’ experience with your company so that the eventual sale feels like a natural, even welcome culmination to the relationship. Here’s a few ideas:

Finding the Point of Need: Listening carefully for when people are asking the right kinds of questions or seeking the sort of information that you can helpfully provide, which turns you into a problem solver instead of a pitch artist. It’s the difference between having your response or comment be an ill-timed interruption or a perfectly timed contribution. Not every mention of your company or competitor is the same as an expressed need, so study the difference and handle with care.

Being Responsive: Few things raise the hackles of people as much as the feeling of being ignored. Be there when someone is asking for you, answer inquiries in a timely fashion (on the web that usually means minutes and hours, not days), and you’ll already be ahead of the game. We don’t ever scold businesses for being too responsive when we’ve asked for their attention, so it’s a worthy goal to aim for. The web moves fast, so we as businesses need to be prepared for new notions of speed.

Availability (and Ease) of Information: Take care to make your website and social destinations user friendly and a fluid experience that reflects the focused needs and attention of social consumers. Have lots of resources front and center, and easy to find, whether it’s on your website or elsewhere. Make them easy to consume, download, and share (from file formats to concise writing and simple visuals). Focus on providing the information that your prospects want and are asking for (even if you didn’t create it!) not just the information you’re wanting them to see.

Being friendly: Amazing as it may seem, politeness, enthusiasm, and manners are not as ubiquitous as we’d like them to be. Teach your front line staff how to be gracious, helpful, and friendly on the web, even in the most trying of circumstances or in the presence of criticism or competition. Help them stay approachable and accessible in the places and ways that your customers are reaching out to you. And if you can’t teach them to do that, it’s time to get different staff to work the front lines of social media. It’s that important.

Focus on the In-Between: As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close. But what we forget too often is that the sale is a momentary, and temporary point in time. It’s an important one, but the sustainability of a sale and a customer is only as good as the experiences between the transactions. Before the sale and after the sale. We spend most of our time as customers in the moments outside of the sale itself, yet we often treat those moments as merely the means to an end through our business lens. Shaping and nurturing the entire customer lifecycle is important, and the interactivity and pervasiveness of social media makes it beautifully suited for the task.

So can sales and social media co exist and even work together? Absolutely. But it requires all of us to remember that a sale is a multi-faceted thing with many variables along the way. And when we start seeing our sales as living, breathing cycles instead of instances that stop and start, we can start understanding and investing in all of the moments and experiences that make a sale a success.

What’s your experience with selling and social media? How are you seeing it done well, and what turns you off? Would you buy from you and why? I’d love to hear more of your take in the comments.

It’s no big secret that the Old Spice campaign has been a success. News outlets and blogs including the Financial Post, AdWeek and Mashable covered it, thousands have tweeted about it (myself included), and millions have watched the videos posted on YouTube.

I happened to stumble upon Jason Falls’ post while wandering across the Internet doing some research for this post, and his definition of engagement really struck a chord.

What successful engagement means to me is this:

Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better?

That can mean profits. You sold stuff = Successful engagement.

That can mean ideas. You got feedback on your product or service you can use = Successful engagement.

That can mean referrals and recommendations. You got customers to tell other people you’re cool = Successful engagement.

That can mean digital merit badges. You got people to link to you, follow you, Re-Tweet you = Successful engagement.

We’ve been trained to expect certain outcomes. If we Tweet about a company, they may respond back via an @ reply or a DM. If we write a blog post, we’re used to seeing comments. Many businesses send gifts to their top customers around the holiday season, and many customers have been conditioned to expect these gifts to arrive as the year comes to a close.

Now, the OldSpice campaign was certainly successful, but what really struck me as the most important lesson is this: How can your business use the power of the unexpected to “wow”?

OldSpice did it by recording video responses to Tweets and uploading them in rapid-fire succession to their YouTube page for viewers to watch, enjoy, and share. It may be just one example, but it’s one that worked to help increase sales over 50% in the last three months alone (according to Brandweek).

Going back to Jason’s definition of engagement – here’s the question to answer. How can using something that’s a bit unexpected help your engagement?

Starting off by defining what engagement means to your business is a necessary first step. From there, things become a bit more clear as most will already know the expected path to achieve those goals. The trick is how to put a twist on them to make them work for you and your brand.

So the next time you’re responding to a Tweet, writing an email, writing a blog post, or planning your next marketing campaign, try thinking of ways to incorporate something a bit unexpected into the mix.

I’m curious about your favorite examples of companies that have done this. Share your examples and thoughts in the comments!

Traditionally, the customer service department has been labeled as a cost center, pushing organizations to work endlessly to shorten call times, streamline customer responses, and do as much as possible to reduce the cost of a seemingly never-ending monetary black hole. In doing this, though, all personalization of company-customer contact has been stripped from interactions, and as we’ve mentioned numerous times before, the time has come when that’s just not acceptable to the general public anymore.

Taking the steps to reconnect with your customer base can be tricky, though, when you’ve outsourced your customer response, but there are some strides you can make toward reconnecting without pulling your entire program in-house.

Transactional vs. Relational Customer Service

Customer service representatives are most often tasked with the responsibility of solving customer support issues and resolving complaints, and that’s all they’re asked to do. There’s no push to chat further with customers about pain points, ask them for additional feedback about the company and/or products, or even recommend products for future purchase. In this regard, customer service-based interaction is purely transactional – a customer requests help, their problem is resolved, and the case is closed.

While that tack is certainly effective – and a necessary part of any service and support strategy – there’s a higher level of interaction that an organization can participate in to further develop customer relationships. That type of interaction is what we call “relational customer service”, and it’s based in the idea that proactive interaction on a more human level will develop trust, and trust is what gets people talking about, recommending, and returning to brands.

Relational customer service can’t really be outsourced, though, because a deep understanding of an organization – its culture, business propositions, service and product offerings, and expertise – is needed to succeed in it. That depth of knowledge can’t be sent outside the walls of a company.

Making Room for Relational Customer Service

Your transactional customer service can still be outsourced without damage to your brand, but in addition to developing a thorough response guide and policy for your external customer response team, you must also create strategies for determining when a relationship should be taken in-house, and lay out how your internal teams will handle customer outreach on a relationship-based level.

Here are a few tidbits to consider when making room for relational customer service:

1. Select a few in-house representatives to steward relationships from outsourced customer service channels to the proper internal groups. These people should have an eye toward customer service, be strong representatives of your brand, and come from a variety of departments within your organization. By creating a team to play these roles, you’ve created a sure path for communication and removed any possible confusion as to who should be responding. This is also a great way to start the culture shift necessary to make customer service a bigger part of your company culture.
2. Establish what sorts of customer-initiated outreach requires contact from someone inside your company. Sit down with your customer-facing teams and create a comprehensive list of reasons your customers reach out to you, then bucket those reasons into transactional and relational categories. Not only will this exercise get you started developing a relational customer service strategy, it’ll provide perspective as to what sorts of information your customers are looking for and get you thinking about how you can fulfill additional needs of theirs.
3. Consult with your executive team and find out if they want to be accessible to customers via online social or traditional communication channels. Some executives – like ours here at Radian6 – have an online presence that allows them to share expertise and talk with the community directly, but not all corporate cultures are (or will ever be) ready to have their C-Suite that connected to customers. If a few of your executives want to get involved on a more proactive, relationship-oriented level, and are willing to find the time to do so, work with them to target where and how their interaction will be most valuable.

The key to making a relational customer service program successful is establishing criteria for what are transactional and relational customer comments and inquiries, mapping how those comments and questions will be routed into your organization, and constructing an internal team that has the customer service chops and a true understanding of your brand to handle that direct customer interaction.

This is just the tip of the relational customer service iceberg, of course. Don’t be afraid to bring some of your customer interactivity back into the walls of your organization — the opportunity to build relationships through direct connection is huge, and it’s an increasingly important piece of the customer purchasing (and loyalty) puzzle.

For all the talk about social-media-for-customer-service case studies, the very basic question of, “OK, so how could this work for my business?” often remains unanswered. Jumping on Twitter and beginning to answer questions may seem like a great thing to do, but there is a necessary amount of thought and planning that must happen before most businesses can successfully take that leap.

Review

Before an online response strategy can be created, the people involved in the process need to have a firm grip on current policies and procedures, ongoing initiatives, reporting practices and personnel, among other things. Take a moment and look at what is current going on. How do you field calls? What about product inquiries that result from support calls? How are support cases escalated? What are your teams measured on? Who is the head honcho in charge and who do they share their progress with? How do you train your employees? What are your turnover rates?

These questions are a great start to getting the current lay of the land, and a necessary precursor to defining your online response strategy.

1 – Consistency

In order for an online response strategy to ultimately be successful, it has to tie in with your other response outlets (phone, email, snail mail, etc). Take a good look at what your current response strategies are. What practices are consistent across the mediums? Can these practices be put into place for your online responses, or do they need to be modified? Who needs to sign off on the changes? What legal or regulatory concerns are involved (if any)?

An online response strategy isn’t a silo’d entity just because it’s online. It has to not only tie in to, but support and reinforce your other methods of response. If it doesn’t, you run the risk of duplicated efforts, or different messages reaching the same customer and causing confusion.

2 – Tool Identification

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be everywhere online, but you do need to be active in places where it makes sense for your business. Your online response strategy should clearly state the tools you’ve identified as important to your business, and the identification should be based off real-world research, not just “what’s popular”. Forums are still a very popular place for support inquiries (I posted in one last week, in fact), though your membership may only return when they’re having problems. If your user base isn’t on Twitter, you may prioritize creating an online support presence there far lower than another business would, and choose to spend your time elsewhere. There is no “one size fits all” right answer, as ultimately, it depends on your business and your customers. The right answer is one that allows your support teams to reach customers where they already exist.

3 – Escalation Chain

Online response strategies should still include an escalation chain. Responding to someone asking a question on Twitter doesn’t mean that their question won’t require manager input, so be prepared to escalate their questions up the chain of command just like you would if they called your support center.

Depending on your business, you might need multiple escalation documents. A company I previously worked for segmented out their customers (wholesale/resale, partner, etc.) and delivered each user group their own unique escalation chain based on their needs and the support members most able to answer their questions.

4 – Integrated Reporting

This may sound fancy, but the question is simple. How are you going to use your existing systems to capture this new support data? Can you tie your CRM system to inquiries that come through via Twitter, for example? How can you provide clarity around what you’re doing (and where you’re providing the support) and measure your online responses?

If you’ve done your background work, you’ve already set measurable objectives, which will guide your online response strategies. From these strategies, drill down and decide which metrics you’ll use to measure your success. Do these line up where possible with other mediums? Do they support information presented in other reports, such as call volume?

A Word About Engagement Guidelines

Your online response strategy should line up with your pre-set engagement guidelines and provide a consistent voice no matter the medium. In addition, though, your strategies should also note when conversations should be moved from one response tool to another — say, from Twitter to email. It’s likely that your online response strategies will require your engagement guidelines to be tweaked in some areas, and that’s completely OK. This isn’t a one-way street, and for most companies you’ll be breaking new ground when developing these strategies and working down to your tactics. Your guidelines should support this new ground. Evolution is good!

What have I missed? The comments are yours to add thoughts, questions, and examples!

Radian6 advocates social media listening, monitoring, and measurement, but what about engagement? Is it worth it to start “engaging” with your online audience? What does engagement actually mean for you? Does your community want you to talk? Find support as to why engagement is important and how you can get started in this white paper.

Southwest has embraced the power of social media to give their customers access to what’s happening behind the scenes at the airline, and hear what they have to say about their experiences with the company. They’re proof positive that listening, engaging, and embracing communication with your customers is a key to building long-term brand awareness, loyalty, and even a bit of fun.

The end of the year is a popular time for reflection, and often times we look big picture to see what the past year has carried with it, and where the future might lead.

While you’re looking at trends and the big stories, though, now is a great time to reflect on your own company and where it stands with immersion and integration of social media. Looking back with an honest eye can help you get a handle on what worked, what didn’t, and how you’d like to sketch out next steps in 2010. Auditing should be as much a part of your business processes as planning.

So gather your team, grab some coffee and bagels, and talk through some of these questions for listening, engaging, and measuring social media.

Listening

1) Are we satisfied with how our listening outposts are set up? Do we feel like we’re getting the data and information we need?

2) What have we heard overall so far? What are the key themes that run through our listening efforts? What are the positives about what we’re hearing, and what do we want to work on?

3) How have we disseminated our listening intelligence through the business? Where could we improve this in the coming year?

4) Where have we focused our listening efforts to date (marketing, branding, PR, customer service)? What other aspects of the business could benefit by more organized listening efforts, and how can we help them integrate it?

5) How can we expand our listening efforts beyond our brand? What about things like industry trends or competitive analysis, and what advantages would those have for us?

Engaging

1) How would we define our engagement and outreach strategy this year on social networks? Was it primarily reactive or proactive? Is that course working for us, and why or why not?

2) What were our goals for participating in social media conversations, and did they change through the year? How?

3) Did this year illustrate the need for social media/engagement guidelines? Or if we already have them, how might we need to update them in the coming year?

4) What did we learn about our community and market’s expectations for things like response time, available information and answers, and what were the topics that came up most?

5) Where might we need to connect internal dots and processes to better flow the information and interactions that come from social media? Are there new/other departments and people we need to involve?

Measurement

1) Are we currently measuring elements of our social media efforts? Which goals do they align with, and what are we tracking?

2) What are we not tracking right now that would help us better understand the impact of our social media programs? What metrics or measurements do we have the capacity to track, and which require new methods?

3) Based on what we’re tracking, what efforts are progressing positively, and how do we define that? Which ones aren’t working as well as we expected, and what will we adjust based on what we’ve measured?

4) How much time are we devoting to measurement proportionally? Does it feel like too much or too little? How can we adjust? Do we have the right tools in hand to do the analysis we need?

5) How are we communicating our learnings from our tracking efforts, and to whom? Is that process working or how do we refine it?

So these are just a handful of ways to look back at 2009 and see where you’ve come, and help chart where you’re headed. You’ve got more, I’m sure, but perhaps these get you thinking.

Ask the hard questions. Ask some that you don’t have answers to, but make it a point to drive toward those answers in the coming year. Think about where you are on the path of social media maturity, and what the next logical steps are based on your available resources, goals, and other priorities.

What else are you looking at to see how your social media programs stacked up this year?

image by xmatt

& MTV is listening….

MTV is changing TV – yet again.  It’s listening and engaging with its audience – which at first glance, just sounds smart, not new.  But when you consider the audience is engaging from Twitterville, it starts to sound really interesting.

TV and Twitter Talking Together?

What do Tiger Woods, Adam Lambert and Twilight’s movie cast have in common?  While it sounds like the start of a bad joke, they’re actually the hot topics among the at-home TV audience for an MTV pop culture show – where real-time conversations from Twitter are integrated into the content of the TV show; “It’s On With Alexa Chung”.

Alexa Chung is a 26-year-old former British model turned TV host. Her American MTV show debuted in June featuring celebrity interviews, live music and videos: a mash up of TV and web to attract a young audience who spends time on Facebook and Twitter.

The audience interacts across a number of platforms:  TV, online and mobile. There’s a large and active following on Twitter. The show engages that Twitter audience who tweet their thoughts about the guests and the show. Then MTV takes the pulse of viewers by aggregating the themes of those Twitter conversations. What’s cool is that MTV then reflects that picture back to the audience via a visualization called Twitter Tracker.

MTV’s Twitter Tracker visualizes the volume of tweets around a guest or show topic based on the Twitter activity generated by MTV’s hosts, guests and fans. An individual who will never step inside the MTV studio is still able to engage, contribute content and become a catalyst to generate even more conversations – while becoming part of a community of fans and part of the story.

The show broadcasts weekdays for 30-minutes but the Twitter Tracker keeps the pulse of conversation going for the other 23.5 hours a day on its website — giving fans the opportunity to engage anytime.  This builds on MTV’s continued leadership in being a brand that engages its audience where, when and how they want.

The Genesis of Twitter Tracker:

The potential to use this innovative application with a daily audience has its roots in a couple of successful one-time shows. Twitter visualizations were first used during the MTV Video Music Awards show September 13^th and again during the European Music Awards show November 5^th.  As the shows were being broadcast, the Twitter Tracker was reflecting what people at home were tweeting about the show, connecting the at-home audience with a TV host who was reporting what was being tweeted. The show inspired the tweets and the audience’s tweets fed the show.  What celebrity doesn’t want instant feedback?

Here’s a taste of the first MTV Twitter visualization at the VMAs:

How it works and why it’s important:

These applications and content are created through a partnership of MTV, Twitter, Stamen Design and Radian6. Stamen creates the great visuals and applications that plug into the Radian6 platform.

For Radian6, it’s great to have clients like MTV who use the Radian6 platform in new and different ways. It also shows the potential of integration of social media with TV and other forms of offline media.

More importantly it shows how MTV works on growing a community. Engaging their audience and fans online at any time of day keeps them connected with content, not just during a broadcast. It also enables a window into the audience to discover what they’re thinking and talking about.  It’s no longer just about watching TV; it’s about enabling a live interaction between the show and the audience.  By bringing the community into the content, brings new people into the conversation and reinforces to the audience that they are part of the whole experience.

So what’s next?

MTV has been a leader in pretty well everything in media since it launched in 1981.  It’s a network built on firsts: in programming, technology, popular culture and personalities.  They’ve continually shaped and reflected the new and the emerging and no doubt will challenge us at Radian6 with new ideas to engage their community in the experience.

About Rob: Rob Begg is Radian6’s Director of Business Development for the media and entertainment industries.  You can connect with Rob on Twitter @rbegg.

We’re excited that we’re finally launching a project we’ve had in the works for a while: a podcast! The Engaged Brand is focused on sharing stories, case studies, and best practices from brands who are embracing the potential of social media to connect with and engage their customers online.

We’re just getting ramped up so you’ll see more episodes coming down the pike in the near future, but what better way to kick off the series than with one of the brands leading the charge: Comcast.

Frank Eliason has demonstrated the power of Twitter as a customer service channel, and he’s sharing their successes and learnings at his speaking engagements across the country. His team has grown, their approach and strategy has evolved, and in this interview he shares with us some of the ways that Comcast has tapped social media to create a better, stronger customer experience.

So download the podcast and sit back and take a listen to The Engaged Brand: Comcast’s Frank Eliason, and share your thoughts!