Oops. You just emailed your social media plan to Nina, your biggest customer, by mistake. The blood drains from your face. What will she think?

Use this little scenario as a mental check on your social media activities. Are your tactics meant to benefit your community — or to just manipulate them for your own ends?

So read your plan again with your customer’s eyes. Imagine how Nina would feel if she found out you were …

• erasing bad product reviews
• anonymously trashing your competitors
• artificially swelling your follower counts
• ghostwriting your CEO’s blog posts
• abusing customers’ Facebook data

If you’re doing slimy things like this, smarten up now — or wake up one horrible morning to read your company’s expose on The Consumerist.

Don’t just avoid ethical pitfalls. Your social media plan should fill your fans with anticipation of all the great ways you’re going to make their life more enjoyable this year. Here are some activities you should include in your social media plan:

• passing along helpful information
• publishing useful content
• providing superb customer service
• answering product questions promptly
• maintaining a friendly, human presence
• admitting when you screw up and making it right immediately
• rewarding and honoring your best fans
• delighting your fans in surprising ways
• guiding them to the products and services they actually need

If your social media plan is bursting with ways to serve your community, people like Nina will reward you with their business, their loyalty, and their advocacy. And you’ll never have to fear being exposed.

What social media tactics would make you angry? And which ones really delight your community? Let us know in the comments.

If you don’t have time to read ten blog posts today, we’ve got you covered. When it comes to social media strategy, we write many blog posts each day but there are a select few that can bring your organization to social enterprise level. Much like last week’s top ten ebooks, we’ve selected the top ten posts that our community has found most helpful. Told you we’ve got you covered. Cue the easy button.

	100 Uses of Social Media Monitoring Starting out in the world of monitoring social media can be challenging, so with these 100 uses, you now have a big list of options. Broken into ten categories, the list makes it easy to find your areas of interest. We also created a presentation out of it. And since this is not an exhaustive list, another 100 uses list may not be too far away. Read this post
	30 Ideas for your 2012 Social Media Plan As a synopsis to the corresponding ebook, this post highlights the 30 ideas in a easy-to-grasp list. It’s a checklist to scope out your current and upcoming social media plans. Plus it’s organized into sections to help you find the ideas that fit your needs. Read the post
	The Future of Analytics – Not Everyone is  Numbers Person There are many people who find it difficult to synthesize measurement. And that’s ok. If you’re one of those people, this post might inspire you as the future generation of statisticians and analysts. Or you may just prefer a bedtime story to a pie chart. Read the post
	Training your Company for Social Media This post introduces the ebook, Training Your Company for Social Media, and both guide you through a training outline that will help you prepare your employees, whatever the number, for social media. This includes why training is so important, the steps to take, a training course framework and ongoing education. Read this post
	20 Ways Social Media is Like Your Crazy Ex Both social media and your crazy ex had you enamored at first, and then you realized how much time and effort it was going to take to keep things going. Like any relationship, the ones you have cultivated through social networks and new media require nurturing in order to be successful and stand the test of time. This post pokes fun but reminds you that social business is no joke. Read this post
	The Future of Analytics This post introduces the ebook, The Future of Analytics, whichs dig into where measurement stands when it comes to social media. What is the future of social media analytics? Why is it so important, and how can you start making it an important part of your business objectives? This post answers these questions and more. Read this post
	Dare to Be Different: 3 Ways that Social Media Can Set Your Business Apart Gleaning strong insights about your competitors can help you make smarter and more nimble business decisions, especially thanks to the fast moving nature of social media. But success isn’t always about going head to head with louder marketing. Social media provides companies the opportunity to take a few considered, practical steps toward standing out amongst the pack and providing value for the customers and prospects they serve. Read this post
	Social Media University Dell ensures that each and every employee is a fully functioning and engaged member of their social media strategy. They created an innovative and company wide social media certification program. This post is an interview with Amy Fowler-Tennison, Dell’s SMaC University Program Lead. It includes some great tips on empowering your employees in social media, and why it’s so vital to your organization. Read this post
	Top Ten Enterprise Social Media Etiquette Fails A crowdsourced post, we share examples of the most egregious violations of social media etiquette perpetrated by companies. From not following back to being pushy, this post shares what not to do in an effort to give you some helpful tips about engaging in social media. Read this post
	10 Simple Ways Social Media and Traditional Media Work Together This blog covers a lot of social media content, but traditional media is just as important. After all, those Times Square Billboards aren’t going away anytime soon. This post discusses the different ways to blend the online and offline space. Read this post

We spanned the social media landscape from listening to analytics to crazy ex’s. What posts are helpful to you? What new posts would you like to see?

TD offers a wide range of financial products and services to approximately 20.5 million customers worldwide. With such a large global presence and strong commitment to customer service,  TD has embraced social media as a new way to connect and engage with their customers. While some organizations in the financial service industry have been shy to reach out to customers on social media, the team at TD did their homework, prepared a great strategy for online engagement, and went to work successfully interacting on the social web.

The team at TD believes in being there for their customers, and are pleased to offer extended hours at many of their branches, including weekends and evenings. They also offer customer service on the phone and now on Twitter, blogs and Facebook. For TD it makes perfect sense that they would expand their customer service to the social media channels that their customers like to use. It means they can provide help when other channels of communication that are not available – such as the power outage during Hurricane Irene this past summer. During this situation, TD provided support to their customers via Twitter to share up-to-date information about branch hours and ATM availability.

Take a look at this case study to learn more about TD’s social customer service offerings.

Tell us what you think – would you like to see your bank taking a more active role in social media?

TD understands that customers expect their bank to be accessible, helpful and responsive to their needs. To TD that means being there for customers where they feel most comfortable, whether it’s in the branch, on the phone or via social media channels.

Learn how TD has built up their social media teams to deliver superior service online and into the hands of their customers.

One of the best ways to use social media is to listen for customer service opportunities. Treat each piece of information as a gift, because that’s exactly what it is. You’re getting valuable insight straight from the people who matter most – your customers.

Avoid A Crisis

Monitoring your brand mentions gives you the ability to identify customer service issues as they emerge. Handling these issues as they arise, in real-time, can prevent a potential crisis. In doing so, you can monitor and track ongoing customer concerns, and share that feedback with the teams in your organization.

Build Relationships

Take the opportunity to build relationships with your social consumers. Use your social networks not just to answer questions but to ask them as well. Be sure to respond to positive feedback (and negative – see above) and share helpful company information. For example, share answers to the top 5 frequently asked questions. Try sharing fun, little-known facts about your company to help strengthen your social customers’ bond with your brand.

Get Feedback

If you’re feeling up to the challenge, ask your customers directly for their comments and questions about your current products. But before you do, be sure your social media strategy includes a plan for tracking those responses, as well as how you’re going to handle both the good and the bad. It may be bold, but that is one sure-fire way to receive instant feedback.

Boost Sales

Another up-side to listening to your customers’ concerns is that they may provide insight and opportunities for new product offerings and potential new product features. You may even discover new uses for your existing products – which in turn, could boost sales.

Get Ahead of the Competition

Though you may not think listening to what people are saying about your competitors might be a customer service opportunity, it is. Listening to the conversations around your competitors’ products is the perfect opportunity to fill a need that your competitors cannot. That type of competitive intelligence could also lead you to new product offerings and potential new product features.  For more in competitive intelligence, download our eBook, Getting the Competitive Edge with Social Media.

We focus much of our time and energy on engaging and interacting with our social customers that we may forget that it’s also alright to listen. When you take the time to listen and respond thoughtfully, social consumers will come to rely on the customer service you provide though these channels. It will open the lines of communication and give you back so much more than you invest.

For even more ideas on how you can build social media into your business strategy, check out this month’s eBook, 30 Ideas for your 2012 Social Media Plan.

Are you using social media monitoring to listen for customer service opportunities? How does your brand help consumers through its social networks? Do you think there are drawbacks to providing customer service though social channels?

When something goes wrong in the office, HR inevitably gets called in for damage control. This applies when an organization’s use of social media goes wrong, too. As organizations begin crafting formal social medial policies, there are certain situations and mishaps for which they should be prepared. However, when looking at social media blunders, I realized that those mishaps offer some great insights into social media best practices.

Here are the three snafus of 2011 that stood out to me as having some serious lessons to learn from an HR perspective:

1. Communications Disconnect at Qantas.

When launching a Twitter campaign in November, Qantas–the premiere airline in Australia–had a serious breakdown in communications. Amid widespread disruptions in service (the entire fleet had been grounded in October) they attempted to create some positive energy by asking followers to describe their “dream luxury in-flight experience” using the hashtag #QantasLuxury. The problem? The campaign launched the day after Qantas and its unions stopped contract talks. Customers hijacked the campaign’s untimely campaign and used the hashtag to voice serious complaints.

Key Takeaway: Keep your people connected. When managing your social media presence, these kinds of breakdowns in communication can have serious consequences. As such, establishing clear channels for disseminating need-to-know information to key players in your management team is a must. Qantas’ mishap is a case in point on the importance of making it easy to quickly distribute key communications, not to mention the value in maintaining a degree of transparency in less-than-ideal times.

2. Kutcher’s Quickfire Backfire.

As many organizations are learning, not everyone is equipped to keep small blunders from turning into social media firestorms–even if your organization is the brand behind a celebrity figure. There needs to be a process for managing your online presence. CBS’ new “Two and a Half Men” star, Ashton Kutcher, sent out a particularly nightmarish tweet to 8.5 million followers in November, which seemingly supported Joe Paterno. After realizing his error, Kutcher offered a public apology and turned over management of his Twitter account to his PR team.

Key Takeaway: Be prepared for the worst. When building a social media strategy–be it for sourcing and recruiting talent or for branding and advertising–your plan should ensure your people have a course of action outlined for cleaning up small mishaps before they become big messes.

3. American Red Cross Turns it Around.

An employee of the American Red Cross sent out an inappropriate tweet via the @RedCross Twitter account indicating that employees were getting “slizzered” on Dogfish Head beer. To the surprise of many (and the joy of a vested few), Wendy Harman, Social Media Director for the Red Cross, was able to turn this around with grace and good humor. The rogue tweet was down within the hour, and Harman responded with a tweet assuring that the Red Cross was sober, adding, “We’ve confiscated the keys.” Meanwhile, they retained the (very embarrassed) employee, and Dogfish Head took the opportunity to launch a fundraising campaign for the Red Cross.

Key Takeaway: Keep your cool. Because of their quick and classy response, the Red Cross turned a PR nightmare into a lesson in humility, and has been earning kudos since. This indicates a strong sense of teamwork and unity in the organization. “We are an organization that deals with life-changing disasters and this wasn’t one of them,” Harman told Mashable. “It was just a little mistake.”

Last Year’s Blunders: A Boon for HR in 2012?

While it’s easy to look back on social media snafus, HR professionals have their work cut out for them this year. The blunders of 2011 present a great opportunity for HR to step up to the plate and spearhead the design, implementation and oversight of formal social media policies for their organizations in 2012.

For more blunders, see this AdAge post.

Kyle Lagunas is the HR Analyst at Software Advice. On the surface, it’s his job to contribute to the ongoing conversation on all things HR. Beyond that, he makes sure his audience is keeping up with important trends and hot topics in the industry. Focused on offering a fresh take on points of interest in his market, he’s not your typical HR guy.

Are you ready to invest in social media? Building your social media equity has never been easier. This financial services ebook contains lucrative new content to help you get started. You’ll learn how to share with customers without driving them away, how to gain valuable competitive intel, how to get through difficult social media situations and what to listen for to get real business value from social media. Soon, with a solid social listening strategy in place, you’ll be well on your way to interacting with your clients, and implementing product improvements based on the conversations you’ve heard.

For years, I’ve been saying that the real value of enterprise social media will be realized when we develop a business unit focus. Many companies are using social media for PR or marketing or customer service. We’re not seeing complete integration across the enterprise yet, and that must be the goal. Eventually social media will just be another layer, like the web or e-mail. We’re on our way there.

For social media to be more than a novelty, and provide real enterprise-wide value, it needs to be on everyone’s desktop. I am by no means the first person to say, “Customer service is the new PR,” but it is increasingly true. No one will care about the glowing words you put in your press release if they had a terrible experience with your product and no one paid any attention. No one will want to come to work for your company if your public face is grumpy and disgruntled.

Social media is vital for all parts of the organization, and that’s why I’m excited about the launch of the Salesforce Social Hub™. Obviously I’m not an unbiased party, but this is what I’ve been envisioning for years as an enterprise social media practitioner. The Salesforce Social Hub™ will enable teams to collaborate better. It will allow organizations to seamlessly share social media data and response. And it is a giant step toward making social CRM a reality.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to convince reluctant executives that social media can support bottom line business objectives. But now I can show them how a tweet about their company can instantly become part of their customer relationship management system and be turned into a lead. No one can argue with the value of that, especially when it’s integrated across the enterprise.

See the Salesforce Social Hub™ in action with this video.

Today’s consumers are increasingly turning to social media to find the information that influence their purchasing decisions, as well as share their own retail experiences with others. From marketing and sales to customer service, the entire retail experience is going digital, and the success of your retail brand hinges on how you build your own presence and engage in the social space.

Whether you are just getting started in the social space or have an existing social media strategy that’s ready for the next level, this retail industry-specific ebook will answer your questions, get you thinking and inspire you for the future.

I am always excited to learn about our customers’ social media successes and achievements with our platform. I had the pleasure of spending last week visiting some of our customers to learn more about what they are doing in the social media space, and chatting with them about the opportunities that exist in social media across different industries.

Over the coming weeks, I will be sharing stories, videos and photos from these visits, but in the mean time, here is a sneak peek at some of the innovative things our customers are doing.

Omnigon Communications is a creative team of experts helping their clients transform the way viewers interact and engage with traditional sporting events and major television events like the recent Charlie Sheen Roast.

Kim White from Omnigon Communications

Comcast is leading the way in social customer service. The Comcast Cares team is a truly dedicated group that believes in putting their customers first. I got the chance to sit and talk to them about how social media is changing the way they engage with customers and how they have seen customers become friends.

Kip Wetzel from Comcast

The United Nations Development Programme is using social media to make a real difference in communities all around the world. One of their latest projects, “One Action against Poverty”, is helping citizens across the globe in the fight against poverty, and social media has given these citizens, and the UN, the power to share their efforts and inspire others.

Sebastian Majewski from the UNDP

And my last stop found me in the “sweetest place on earth,” Hershey, PA. It was a great visit with Hershey’s; they are connecting and engaging, sharing ideas, recipes and lots of delicious candy with their customers. They are working to ensure that their customers’ voices are heard throughout the organization and the benefits of social listening and engagement are apparent.

Hershey's Chocolate World

Stay tuned as we share how these customers are using Radian6 to make an impact on their organizations and their industries.

Jenn Seeley at Disney Parks Canada

Social media is changing the way people travel, and more importantly the way relationships are developed as a result.  Whether you’re ready to embrace it or not, the ship is already sailing. Technology and the internet have made this vast planet easier to navigate as social media helps fuel the lust for travel.

Just last week, I was in beautiful Montreal for the CAA Vision Travel Conference. Although the keynote presentations were largely unique, the idea and importance of relationships carried on throughout. Just how does the travel industry connect with passengers and form long lasting relationships? Let’s journey through a few thoughts together.

Travel Romanticized

Whether laughing with the WestJet flight attendant, touring with Contiki, or running through a Disney Park with abandon, the love for travel has not changed. The method in expressing and sharing that love has, however, evolved. The world’s largest industry continues to tug at heartstrings and seduce people into that next trip.

Your guests fall in love with the idea of travel before even beginning that overwhelming  search for the right travel agency, booking engine or inspiration. Among social media users, 52% admit to being inspired in their travel choices by photos posted by friends on Facebook. (see more cool stats in this fancy infographic by tripl.com)

Exhilarating Rush

From research, seeking out the right travel agent for the job, booking and planning an itinerary and finally packing the bags, your passengers/guests/new found friends are typically pumped and excited to be on their way. Adventure seekers and sun worshipers alike have the opportunity to fall for a destination, a site, an attraction, a freshly fluffed pillow, a sunset, or a single moment. But will that lust-turned-love return the good feeling and have a forever soul mate?

Passionate Connections

Typically, the fountain in your courtyard or the characters in costume do not go home with your guests, but your brand can remain with customers via social channels. Social is about making connections and forming a lasting relationship. In fact, “social needs to be embedded in everything you do,” according to our very own David Alston, and I could not agree more.

Did you know that, 72% of social network users are checking in on a daily basis while on the move, at your resort, in line at your ticket counter or checking out of your hotel? If you aren’t connecting with them, forming legitimate friendships with them and feeling confident that they’ll choose to dance with you again when the next slow song plays on the radio, then another travel brand just like you is taking advantage of a new relationship left un-nurtured.

Jeff Walker of CAA National talked about the ‘antidotal voice of the member’ and how members are a credible voice. Targeted listening and strategic engaging across social media channels will allow you to help keep the love of your travel brand burning. If your guests are talking about their vacation, sharing pictures in social spaces and engaging with their friends, you should be vying for better-than-BFF status, and giggling excitedly with your customers as they recall the sights in Africa on an AmaWaterways riverboat cruise.

The love song that woos your next passenger and delights your next guest resonates on social media channels and without targeted social media monitoring and listening, you may miss opportunities for relationships with your guests that will have them coming back for more.

What changes have you made to be more intimate and connected with your passengers & guests via social media? What changes do you see in the horizon?

Jenn Seeley is pretty happy to have hung out with the CAA, WestJet, Disney Parks Canada, Contiki and AmaWaterways folks she recently met. Here’s to lasting social media friendships!

** interesting fact to note: 97% of Canadians are familiar with the CAA brand, but not all are aware of the fullness of the travel services they offer.

As we saw with Relish Gourmet Burgers, small businesses are cooking up success with social media. And Mabel’s Labels Inc., a small, innovative label-making business out of Canada, has a successful social media recipe of their own.

Julie Cole is co-founder of Mabel’s Labels. She started the company over eight years ago with her three business partners. All were Moms that felt that the market was lacking personalized, durable and cute labels for the stuff kids lose. So where does social media come into play? Today, Julie shares her insights on creating a small business social media strategy that’s as sticky as the labels she produces.

Thanks so much for your time today, Julie. We’re excited to learn about your approach to social. How do you use social media for your small business? Customer service? Brand awareness? Relationship and community building?

All of the above. In the early days of social media, we did a lot of blogger outreach. Very few companies understood the power of bloggers the way we did. We recognized that by reaching the blogging community with our products, they would then reach out to their communities. Word of mouth has always been our most powerful marketing tool at Mabel’s Labels, and social media brought WOM online, allowing us to expand our reach. Now social media allows us to interact with our 33, 000+ Facebook Fans regularly, respond to a customer on Twitter and share information through our WOM brand ambassador program, Buzzmamas™. We are proud of our customer experience at Mabel’s Labels and where our customers choose to seek assistance is where we will help them out. If we can help our busy customer in 140 characters and eliminate the need for them to take the time to call or write an email, we will and often do.

From blogger outreach to customer service. You certainly find an array of ways to tap into the social web. But how is it helping enhance your business?

Our market demographic is online – they are there to shop, to work and to access social networks. It makes sense for us to be in that space. Social media has broken down any barriers between customer and business owner. Most of our customers feel as though they know us, and people are more likely to support the brands they feel connected to.  Our customers shape what products we come out with next so the feedback we receive by listening and asking questions on Facebook or Twitter is invaluable. Every tidbit we receive is written down and put into our “Great Idea Box” at the office and the process is photographed then uploaded to Twitter (when applicable and time permitting)! Blogging about my life raising six kids and running a business opens up the doors of my life to our customers, which leads to them opening their doors, and friendships and sales being made.

Adding that human element and personality can enable consumers to relate to your brand. Do you have examples of how you relate to consumers?

Julie Cole, Co-Founder of Mabel's Labels

Last year the television show “Glee”, ran an episode all about Madonna and the cast were wearing “WWMD” – “What Would Madonna Do” wristbands. Of course everyone was on Twitter loving the wristbands and wishing they were available for sale. Before the episode was over we had limited edition “WWMD” labels designed, and spread the word that evening to our social networks that if you placed an order with “WWMD” in the comments you would receive a set of the limited edition labels for free.  From a branding point, many people who received the labels now think of “What Would Mabel Do” as opposed to the original intent of “What Would Madonna Do”.  Our ability to act and deliver within the hour the show aired is what really drove the promotion and impressed our Gleek customers. It was light-hearted, simple and we still receive the odd request for “WWMD” labels a year and a half later! In fact, we shipped out a set to a customer who wanted them for her new computer last week!

Another recent example would be our BlogHer ’11 Contest, or more accurately “non-contest” where we had well over 1200 entries, largely through online word of mouth. We knew exactly what sort of entry process would appeal to bloggers, most of whom are busy moms like ourselves, because we have more than a superficial or token involvement in the blogosphere.

Many small businesses want to get started in social media but don’t know how. What advice do you have for them?

I often tell people that this is no time for toe-dipping – people are out there talking about your product, industry, or profession and if you want to be a part of that conversation, you need to get on board with social media. Although it can seem daunting at first, explore one social media avenue at a time. Start with Facebook, then go on to Twitter, etc. If you are feeling shy out there in the social media world, start off just by reading and lurking. Soon you’ll feel comfortable enough to jump in. The only other advice would be to make sure you use the social media tools if you put yourself in that space. There is no point in being there and not responding or engaging with the people in the space with you.

What’s next for Mabel’s Labels in the world of social media?

At Mabel’s Labels we always have our finger on the pulse. Our Social Media Coordinator has a clear understanding of what is happening and how things are evolving. We continue to discover new ways to engage in social media in meaningful ways that create community and foster good business practices.

Thanks so much for your time, Julie. You have a great story and we appreciate you sharing it with our community!

How does your small business utilize social media? How has social benefited you? Share your thoughts here, ask questions and perhaps Julie will jump in and respond! Also, follow Mabel’s Labels on Twitter for their latest social media programs.

Amanda Nelson is a Community Content Manager at Radian6. She is an avid blogger, content curator and border collie fanatic. Find her on Twitter at @mileigh13.

Recently, I had the privilege of meeting and spending time with Shashank Nigam of Simpiflying at two very different conferences. I love what he’s doing with social media for aviation and was pleased when he asked me to write a guest post for his gold medal winning online travel services blog. Below is the original copy of my submission. Likewise, you can read it at Simpliflying here.

Many airlines have entered the social media tarmac for managing customer service  – some are just taking off at greater speeds than others. What can you do to ensure your airline is soaring higher than ever and delivering the service of your customers’ dreams? Let’s break it down in five easy steps!

Always begin with a plan!

So, you can see your customers from time to time talking about you online. You hear them loud and clear. However, projects without a strategy can be a waste of efforts, energy and resources. Sure, you are going to want to reach out and fix every issue you find immediately when you begin to listen, but a well thought out and developed plan is going to take you the extra mile.

A plan starts out simply with knowing what tools you will work with, what training you will need to use those tools properly and who is going to be behind them. Will you have a team of many? Or just one pilot to steer the plane? This Simplifying infographic on Integrated vs Dedicated social media teams is a great review if you are at the planning stage. Know what your end goal is and begin to piece together what the entire project looks like.

Your plan should involve a playbook. You may include how and if you will respond, for example. You can take a look at the playbook Radian6 uses, but please do not feel as though it’s a perfect fit for YOUR team and instead use it as a guide to get your creative juices flowing.

Do what feels right for your goals, just make sure you document it and everyone involved follows the rules. Consider your playbook a living document and make changes as needed – just ensure the whole team has access to every update and acts accordingly.

By now you should be feeling fired up! You’ve found your customers and your playbook is tucked neatly under your arm on your iPad. So now what?

Finding your customers

Sure, they’re in line at the gate waiting to board your newest Boeing 787. They’re probably killing time checking in to Foursquare, sending out one last Tweet about their upcoming vacation or emailing a colleague back at the office. You could always walk up to them and say hello, but with social media and smart technology, you don’t need to. In fact, the best place to reach out and say ‘hey’ is right where they are active and that is what you need to learn first.

Customer service is more than just waiting for someone to tell you directly that they are upset with you or that they need something more out of a relationship with you. Good customer service stems from having a mutual respect and understanding for one another. Knowing where you’re being talked about and in what context helps you immensely.

Identifying where your customers are talking is key. Knowing a few popular social media sites is a great start, but take this knowledge a step further and really dig into the kinds of conversations being had in each of these online outlets. In this case, popularity contests matter. The popular online ‘hang out’ is where you will want to invest time connecting with your customers.

In the example below you will see ‘where’ people are talking about WestJet Airlines over the last two weeks online. You can see that Twitter (micromedia) is where most of the conversation about this airline is happening. It would make the most sense, then, to start with Twitter if you have not already taken to tweeting.

Be friendly, be real and be available.

A smile – whether literal or virtual – can set the friendly tone, so practice conveying those ‘smiles’ and showing off your friendly face via social media. Social media has a fantastic ability to reach the masses, but it can be a balancing act to be succinct and deliver a helpful response in 140 characters or less while ensuring the right tone is felt. You may be hidden behind a laptop in a command room of some sort but your customers want to feel as though you are that smiling, helpful face behind the ticket counter in the airport.

There is no need to feel pressured to be always ‘on’, just identify what you can handle via your social channels and when. The following three airlines all have a different schedule or approach to interacting with their customers on Twitter. KLM has a 24/7 strategy, British Airways has team hours posted and JetBlue lets you know up front that there’s a link they’d prefer you to use for customer complaints. Whatever your plan, make it known and stick to it. Upset customers are especially grateful that you care to listen at all, so make it count.

Know your customers

How is knowing your customers different from finding them? Finding someone at a party and smiling across the room does not mean you know them. Being personable and friendly and even lending an ear while they share their most recent troubles with you is a step in the right direction – but still does not earn you BFF status alone.

Your customers have put themselves out there on the social web and are allowing you many opportunities to know them better. You can easily impress your customers by adding a personal touch to your response. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of knowing your customers is the KLM Surprises campaign. Maybe one day your airline will knock them off of top spot for that honor!

Finally – Engage!

The actual act of interacting with your customers and providing the best service comes last on this list of five. Why? Because your engagement will be more successful if you first know a little bit about your customers, where they are at and you have your winning smile and helpful voice at the ready.

Remember to follow the guidelines you have created for your team to help deliver consistent customer service across the board. Your customers are watching and yes, they are even judging you. Now is your chance to make a stellar impression!

Keep in mind, they’re steps. Take them one at a time. Though there may be turbulent skies as you soar into your social media customer service model, having a plan of attack will ensure smoother flights ahead.

We would love to hear if these steps are helpful to you, or to learn of additional steps that you may take in customer service. Please share your thoughts, questions and comments below!

Jenn Seeley is a Community Engagement Specialist with a travel, transport, leisure & entertainment focus. You’ll notice she’s particularly fond of airlines & travel – especially when she’s going places and meeting like minded thought leaders.

Companies that are new to social media monitoring and engagement frequently wonder where to begin. This can even be a bigger challenge if nobody is talking about your company or brand. We wanted to provide a few examples, okay, well 100 examples, of things that you can listen and monitor for across the social web.

The list is divided into 10 categories, so if you are looking for help in a particular category, see if it is listed below. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are some categories that didn’t make the cut. If there are other ideas you would like to see explored in a future list, let us know in the comments below.

Brand Monitoring
1. Listen for online mentions of your brand
2. Listen for positive mentions of your brand
3. Listen for negative mentions of your brand
4. Listen for direct and indirect questions from customers
5. Discover brand advocates
6. Discover brand detractors
7. Discover influencers for your brand
8. Learn where customers are talking about your brand
9. Listen for the most popular topics about your brand
10. Monitor public perception of your company
11. Listen for mentions of executive team
12. Listen for mentions of product misuse

Competitive Intelligence
13. Discover online mentions of your top competitors
14. Discover competitors’ latest product releases
15. Discover competitors’ recent company news
16. Listen for customer comments about competitors
17. Monitor competitors’ blogs for company insight
18. Monitor competitors’ employees social profiles
19. Monitor competitors’ content for levels of customer engagement
20. Discover negative mentions of competitors and treat as opportunities

Industry Monitoring
21. Listen to mentions of your industry
22. Listen for mentions of your brand compared to your industry
23. Listen for mentions of your competitors as part of your industry
24. Monitor share of voice in your industry
25. Monitor industry trends
26. Discover industry issues
27. Monitor industry news
28. Discover industry influencers
29. Monitor perception of industry by larger business community
30. Monitor changes in social media adoption in your industry

Thought Leadership
31. Monitor changes in conversation volume around key issues
32. Discover industry posts that require comment by your company’s subject matter experts
33. Monitor spread of company thought leadership blog posts
34. Identify online opportunities to share thought leadership
35. Identify speaking opportunities for subject matter experts
36. Determine perception of company as a thought leader
37. Determine perception of company employees as thought leaders
38. Discover other industry thought leaders
39. Monitor influence of company thought leaders
40. Monitor influence of industry thought leaders

Lead Generation and Sales
41. Monitor for buying indication terms within your product category
42. Monitor for recommendation requests within your product category
43. Monitor for discussions of your product category
44. Monitor target prospect personas to confirm accuracy
45. Monitor questions and conversations about your product category
46. Discover topics for remarkable content
47. Share relevant content with prospects
48. Answer direct questions from prospects
49. Discover competitive insights
50. Expand pool of prospects

Customer Service
51. Identify customer service issues as they emerge
52. Monitor volume of conversation around customer service issues
53. Respond to customer service issues in real-time
54. Determine if customers are willing to take issues offline
55. Gather customer feedback to share with other teams
56. Build relationships with customers
57. Answer customer questions
58. Respond to positive feedback
59. Share helpful company information
60. Monitor ongoing customers concerns

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
61. Discover relevant industry keywords
62. Monitor selected keywords for content ideas
63. Discover influencers using selected keywords
64. Determine which keywords are performing best
65. Determine which keywords are not performing
66. Monitor spread of content to determine better titles
67. Connect with people in industry to enhance social search
68. Discover relevant blogs to consider asking for backlinks
69. Monitor SEO influencers to keep up with search engine changes
70. Monitor search engine social profiles to keep up with changes

Crisis Communication
71. Monitor community news sites around facilities
72. Listen actively to conversations around the crisis
73. Establish a baseline for potential threats
74. Establish a baseline for potential failures
75. Find sites that are critical of your brand
76. Find people that are critical of your brand
77. Look for channels to use for crisis outreach
78. Determine potential issues before they escalate
79. Determine the volume of critical conversations
80. Determine sentiment level changes which could indicate a crisis

Product Development
81. Listen for comments on current products
82. Listen for comments on competitors’ products
83. Discover new uses for existing products
84. Discover opportunities for product offerings
85. Solicit product feedback and monitor comments
86. Conduct beta testing
87. Monitor new industry opportunities
88. Listen for potential new product features
89. Understand how customers are using your product
90. Identify points of difference about your product

Advertising and Marketing Effectiveness
91. Track advertising-specific keyword usage
92. Listen for social response to advertising messages
93. Gauge sentiment toward advertising campaigns
94. Monitor conversations from trade shows
95. Monitor unique URLs on your ads
96. Monitor unique phone numbers on your ads
97. Find sites relevant to your brand for online advertising
98. Learn the language of prospects
99. Monitor campaign or brand specific hashtags
100. Solicit user generated content and monitor results

What’s one more thing you’re doing with social media monitoring that you would add to this list?

Jeffrey L. Cohen likes counting to 100, but sometimes he needs help from his pal Amanda. He is a social strategist at Radian6 and the co-author of the forthcoming The B2B Social Media Book. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.

You’re smart and savvy and you know your business, but do you know your social customer? We’ve discussed who your social customers are not; now let’s think about who your social customers are.

Your social customers are smart, and savvy too. You can’t fool them. They know when you’re pitching them. Stop pitching and start focusing on getting to know them.

It’s all about relationships. If you think you don’t have the time to spend on building relationships with your social customers then consider how much it might cost you if you don’t. Take some time to read their stories, visit their websites and comment on their blogs – and have fun getting to know them along the way.

Your social customers are communicators. They want to talk to you, and they want you to talk to them. They also want you to listen. Not just listen quietly but acknowledge that you’ve heard them and care enough to discuss their suggestions, comments and questions further with them.  If you’re invested in your social customers, they’ll be invested in your brand.

Your social customers are frugal. They’re on FourSquare, Groupon, Facebook and Twitter – and they want discounts and perks. They want to feel like VIPs without having to spend the big bucks. Show them they’re valued by giving them something they’ll value. Don’t just roll out random discounts and perks either, but perks based on their interests and discounts on the things that would be useful to them.

Your social customers are busy. They don’t always have time to sit on hold for customer service when it might be faster to send a tweet. They can’t always wait until they get home to call about that issue they’re having. They need to deal with it now while they’re stuck in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. Be ready for your social customers to reach out to you across social networks and make it easy for them to do so.

Your social customers are on the move. They go from home to work and travel the globe. They want to be able to bring up your site wherever they go and they want to do it on a variety of different devices. They want access to your brand on their tablets, on their mobile phones and on their laptops. Make sure your social customers can get the information they need from you while they’re on the go.

Your social customers aren’t all that different from the customers who walk into your brick and mortar storefront. They come in all shapes, sizes and financial flavors and each has the ability to help make or break your brand. Each one is unique and each is an influencer in their own word-of-mouth network and therefore should be treated as such. Value them, get to know them and build relationships with them and you’ll be well on your way to having social customers for life.

Do you know who your social customers are? Do you think they differ from your customers who aren’t engaging on social networks?

Trish Forant is a Community Manager at Radian6. She blogs about social media, life in South Florida and has a Yorkshire Terrier named Sebastian Bark. Connect with her on Twitter at @Dayngr.

The mindset of customers is changing. No longer are they listening to what brands are telling them. They are taking control and actively researching before making decisions. They recognize that social media is the new library for insights into products and services, and are using it to verify and make purchasing decisions. These “social customers” are playing a stronger role in the destiny of the sales funnel. What can brands do about it?

First, we must get a better understanding of this customer. What are they all about? Painting a picture of their mindset enables us to learn who they are and how to please them. So let’s think about this: What are they not?

A social customer is not just on Facebook. Social customers are using multiple outlets to research, share and shout. Some have their own blogs, favorite forums and Twitter chats. Using a social listening tool enables you to get a handle on the overall chatter, no matter where it’s coming from.

A social customer is not emotionless. As Michael Brito shares in his blog, they can be happy with your brand one moment and competitive the next. While factors such as mood and what they’re reading can influence the social customers’ emotional state, providing good customer service will help keep them positive.

A social customer is not uneducated. These customers are listening and learning. They research information online and engage on social media to gather information. At the same time, they are not scholars either. Brands can join them in their journey to make the right purchasing decisions together.

A social customer is not talking to themselves. Their voice, research-filled mind and passion can surely influence others. This applies to both customers who are brand ambassadors and detractors. Get to know these customers. Reward ambassadors and change the mind of detractors.

A social customer is not a spectator. Social media is a place for active participation and engagement. These customers are joining conversations, sharing their stories and contributing to help others. That’s why it’s important to have brand ambassadors to spread your positive message in this environment.

A social customer is not owned. While we’d like to get to know and potentially steer the mind of our social customers, they are free spirits. They have minds of their own and emotions to share. At best, we can help them when they need it, engage where they are, and show them your POV. At the end of the day, the customer will make the call.

A social customer is not solely online. As you engage with these customers on the social web, you can start to develop relationships and eventually take the conversation to a more private environment such as email or a phone call. This gets them further down the sales funnel. Just be patient and let them lead.

There are plenty more “a social customer is not…” scenarios and as we look at them, we start to create a persona of this new customer mindset. It’s always morphing and changing but that doesn’t mean you can’t get acquainted. After all, a social customer is not unfriendly.

What other traits of a social customer, i.e. “a social customer is not..” can you think of? How do you foresee them changing in the future? Share your statement here!

Amanda Nelson is a Community Content Manager at Radian6. She is an avid writer, content curator and border collie fanatic. Find her on Twitter at @mileigh13.

Frontier Airlines is currently in its 18th year of operation, they have more then 5,500 employees and they operate more then 500 daily flights from Denver International Airport, Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport and Kansas City International Airport. Frontier flies to more than 80 destinations in the US, Mexico and Costa Rica. With that number of daily flights, it means that Frontier has thousands of customers depending on them each day.

Find out about how Frontier Airlines and Marco Toscano are using social media to reach out and connect with their customers in this webinar recorded October 20, 2011.

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Airlines are upping their social media game and becoming increasingly present in online communities. Whether you are hoping to increase the number of passengers on board, provide an additional means of convenient customer service or be prepared to manage a crisis, you can leverage social media to make this plan a reality.

In this ebook, for the airline industry, we go through the steps to discover and implement social media for your airline.

Visit our Social Media for Airlines section to learn more about how Radian6 is helping the industry.

Contact Us

With over 40 percent of Americans turning to the internet to facilitate a discussion on some aspect of health care, there’s no better time for the Health Care Industry to connect with the social web. As patients continue to become even bigger advocates for their health and wellness, there will be more and more discussions popping up online.

They are vocal.

They want incentives.

And when they’re looking for help, they want to hear from you.

This is a social customer.

In yesterday’s webinar with author Becky Carroll and our own David Alston, we explored this customer mindset and the opportunities they possess for growing your business. (And don’t worry if you missed it – we’ve got the video below!)

During the packed hour and amidst tons of questions and some Q&A breaks (well, there was a free book incentive for asking a question), Becky walked us through R.O.C.K. – the four keys to growing your business from existing customers.

Relevant Marketing
There is certainly a place for marketing messages on the social web, just in a different way. As you’re listening and understanding your customer, you’ll learn their likes and dislikes, their emotions toward your brand and why they use your product or service. Market to them based on this customer knowledge and they’ll be more apt to listen and respond.

Orchestrated Customer Experience
As mentioned earlier, social customers are looking for a response. They might reach out to your brand on the social web – are you responding? If so, you’re very much in line with the needs and wants of the growing social customer mindset, but keep it up. These customers will soon come to expect this quick and efficient response channel. They may even talk positively to others about their great customer service experience.

Customer-focused Culture
It’s not about you. It’s about your customers. But focusing your efforts on customers and their needs starts from the inside. Hiring strong employees with a passion for pleasing customers will go a long way for bettering your business. In addition to a strong internal force, you can make huge strides by incorporating social. This connects the social customers with the passionate employees to create a bond.

Killer Customer Service
Killer customer service can be fun. Find ways to make customers happy to increase engagement. And it doesn’t have to be major. Beaver Creek gives out free cookies at the end of a day of skiing. In addition to being nice, be convenient. If your customers are sharing on forums or blogs, consider going to those places to engage. Communicating on their terms also means communicating on their preferred channels.

This webinar gave us a great customer-centric social media strategy with ways to engage, listen, find customers and grow your community. If you missed the webinar, we’ve got the video.

How do you define a social customer? How does the social customer mindset impact your business? Weigh in here and maybe Becky will check in as well!

Amanda Nelson is a Radian6 Community Content Manager. She is an avid writer, content curator and border collie fanatic. Follow her on Twitter at mileigh13.

Find out how social media monitoring and listening can benefit your team’s and your organization’s Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service goals.

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For many of us, the cooler weather is creeping in but Radian6 has another plan. We are heading south! It’s time to talk social in the southern U.S. at a wide variety of conferences over the next few weeks. While the topics are vast, the concept is the same: the social web is changing the way businesses do business.

The first stop is BOLO 2011 in  Scottsdale, AZ. From October 9th through 11th,  Craig Comeau and Dave Lewis will be part of a conference which empowers marketing talent to leverage the power of the social web. With workshops, forums and even a Vaudeville-style event showcasing attendee talent, it seems that the social web and marketing could be a match made in Scottsdale.

Let’s travel further south to Dallas, Texas where Jamie Casey, Darren Macleod and Bob Faigel will meet call center professionals from around the world for ICMI’s Call Center Demo and Conference on October 11th through 13th. It’s a hands-on experience with tours of call centers, exhibits and presentations. All the while, attendees will learn how their day-to-day experiences are impacted by social media and the opportunities to utilize it for the greater good.

Our last stop for today’s post brings us about 1,100 miles southeast to the SOCAP Annual Conference in Orlando, FL. Join a group of Radian6ers including David Alston, David B. Thomas, Zoe Geddes-Soltess and Tom Hasselman for an experience about customer relationship management and the social web. It’s on October 16th through the 19th.

With all this hot social talk, I’ll apologize to my sweaters. They’ll have to wait a bit longer.

We want to know your travels for the next few weeks. What conferences are you attending? Are your social conversations heating up?

Amanda Nelson is a Community Content Manager at Radian6. She is an avid writer, content curator and Border Collie fanatic. Follow her on Twitter at @mileigh13.

Airline Frequently Asked Questions

We currently manage multiple social media accounts – how can you help make this easier?

Our Engagement Console pulls all of your Twitter handles into one easy location, helping you to keep your finger on the pulse of your brand. You can even pull in your Facebook account to stay connected with your fans there, too.

We also allow your team to work collaboratively on projects together with our workflow capabilities, so not only can you manage multiple accounts – you can work with your team to ensure that all questions and comments get replied to as quickly as possible.

We’ve been monitoring the online activity of our competitors – now what?

If passengers are discussing experiences they’ve had with other airlines on the social web, now’s the time to take their comments and critiques and turn them into actionable results. Think of these comments as potential sales leads – they’ll give you the opportunity to understand what your competition is doing, and allow you modify your offerings accordingly. Check out our applications section to learn more about the power of social for generating sales leads.

Our customers are travelling all over the world – how many languages do you track?

Radian6 currently tracks 17 languages, including: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

We’re hoping to use the social web to reach out to customers about flight cancellations and delays – do you monitor in real time?

Everyday we work to return over 8 million relevant results to you, so that you’re always in touch with customer conversations.

Our customer support teams work around the clock – do yours?

We’re pleased to offer 24 hour a day support, five days a week. Call, email or ping us on Twitter and we’ll have you back on track in no time. Click here for more information on our support hours, and all of the ways to reach out to our team.

Have more questions about our platform? Check out our comprehensive FAQ here.

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The lines dividing social customer service and community engagement are often blurred. In many respects providing customer service online is a form of engagement but there are some distinct differences and both have their own set of etiquette and guidelines. Some organizations have chosen to very distinctly separate the two forms of corporate social media by individuals and teams while others, often smaller companies with less resources opt for a social savvy individual undertaking a variety of online engagement. While there is no set formula for either there are general distinctions between the two, specifically concerning etiquette, around when to reach out and how.

First and foremost, at a top level, community could be summarized as an initiative that takes time, attention and constant reinforcement and nurturing. Customer service at its essence is addressing and resolving a problem, transactional, and as such has a definite end or conclusion. While paths may, and likely will cross, objectives differ.

Timing vs. Nurturing

A service or product problem expressed online is blatantly within the realm of customer service and should be addressed as a priority by the customer service team. Being both a customer and someone who on occasion addresses complaints online, time (and as little as possible) is of the essence. Any given issue may require extended time to address properly, however, initial contact and acknowledgement of it should be as close to instantaneous as possible (no pressure!). And, in order to avoid any unnecessary delay this should be resolved by the customer service department, either directly online or offline if it is regarding confidential information or requires further attention.

However, the community team has a role to play. If a customer is complaining online, community teams should be aware of who they are, and why they are upset. This information can help inform a future community content strategy. Moreover in some cases where the person is an influencer or someone known to the community team there is no reason why they should not reach out to this person to gain a greater insight into their concerns in order to gain some quality feedback.

Polar opposite to ‘the complaint’, ‘the promoter’ sits almost exclusively within the realm of community. While a promoter might well encounter a service issue, at which point customer service can jump in, ensuring that there is a relationship with the fans and brand advocates is something that is very far removed from transactional and needs to be nurtured. Promoters are not simply just advocates but often experts in their own right who can add immense value, from sharing your content to guest posts on your blog and inputting in product/ brand development. Very much the opposite of ‘touch and go’ these relationships can be integral to a businesses’ success.

Prioritizing

How, when and where you reach out will be intrinsically different when approaching a service based enquiry as opposed to a mention or industry conversation, as may be the case when acting as a community manager. Speed will be key if there is a complaint whereas content will trump speed on the community front. The value add of community is not necessarily being the first (although it can be nice) it’s quality content and encouraging and furthering the conversation. Community managers can be much broader in their outreach specifically with regards to the industry conversation and as such should approach relevant conversations with a critical and analytical hat. Their aim is to further the industry conversation and perhaps see beyond the horizon as it currently presents itself. As such the ways in which community managers vs. online customer service representatives prioritize is worlds apart and rightfully should be.

Worlds not Universes Apart

While the way these two roles reach out online and the types of conversations they engage in differs, there is ample room for collaboration. The content produced by the community team should add value internally and externally. Likewise community managers may come across service issues either directly or indirectly and as such need to be well aware of support processes, and work to feed through any such content to the relevant teams. As mentioned earlier, smaller organizations may find one and the other in the same person however there should be a clear and differing process regarding how the various conversations are categorized and subsequently followed up and engaged with. Both online customer service and community engagement are pivotal and can benefit hugely from one another. Therefore, it isn’t necessary to prioritize one function over the other, but rather to prioritize the individual pieces of conversation.

What do you think? Can community and customer service work in tandem with each other? If not, why not? Do you agree that the two areas have fundamental differences? Please leave your comments below.

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.

Air Canada is Canada’s largest full-service airline. Their commitment to good customer service was put to the test last December when an unexpected winter storm shut down London’s Heathrow Airport. But the team at Air Canada rose to the challenge and found a way to keep their customers informed and up to date

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.

We have been focusing on customer service this month and in light of of several posts on how to lose your Twitter followers effectively, we thought it appropriate to highlight some key tips on how to provide bad customer service through social media and what steps to undertake in order to turn it around.

1.    Ignore Your Customers

If you are looking to frustrate customers before they even pick up the phone then this might be appropriate. Conveying the image of an organisation seemingly plugged in but then ignoring requests or questions from customers in social media does not help your cause. If you don’t plan on communicating with your customers via Facebook, then is a Page really necessary? Likewise, if you don’t think Twitter would be of use to your business don’t pretend to use it.

If you are not sure of what might work then listen first. Understand what is being said throughout social media; an integral part of any social media implementation plan and strategy. Find out exactly what your customers are saying, where and to whom, understand which avenues of social media would provide added value to both your company and your stakeholders. Once you have tracked this, make sure the knowledge gained is shared throughout your customer services department in order to focus your efforts.

2.    Pretend to Answer Questions

The only thing worse than not responding to your customers is to confuse them even further. Ensure that what you say counts, especially on Twitter. Make those 140 characters work for you even if this means taking five minutes to draft your tweet. If the problem is more complex then make sure you steer the conversation offline to the phone or email in order to provide the additional assistance necessary.

A lot of businesses deal with queries raised through social media by referring them to their website which more often than not does not resolve the problem. What customers are seeking is for someone to solve their query. If the only route to doing so is to jump from channel to channel then this does not usually lead to customer satisfaction but rather to customer frustration.

3.    Don’t Cooperate or Communicate

If you are using a social media channel to complement your customer service strategy make sure that you are connected to the wider business. This can mean using an appropriate CRM system, having a social media policy and ensuring that you have your social media channels included in your customer service objectives. You will find that handovers will run a lot more smoothly if social media is seen as part of the business and not an aside.

In some instances you may need to hand over a query to a more specialised department, but if they are not aware of the social media funnel this may drop off the radar. Alternatively, if there is no agreed system for logging enquiries, customers will find themselves needing to explain the same problem over and over. Therefore, getting the necessary buy in, understanding and having a clear process of communication will save your business considerable time.

4.    Never Escalate Problems

Don’t assume that because the query has come though social media—a channel only you might be responsible for—that you always know the answer. The end objectives of any customer service should be to resolve your client’s problem. While a community manager, often the first one to come across a query, should be well versed in all that concerns the business, they may not always know the answer, or the problem might be severe enough to demand the involvement of a senior manager. To this end it is essential that a proper escalation process is communicated and included in any social media policy.

5.    Don’t Be Proactive

Your customers might not always know where to find you, so take a proactive step to assist your customers. Monitor what is being said in order to provide the assistance necessary when appropriate. Contrary to what has recently been in the news, we have noticed that customers who are provided assistance even when not explicitly contacting a company tend to appreciate this approach. In addition to picking up mentions and questions, having a listening strategy and tool will go a long way to providing key metrics around engagement success, campaign sentiment, or product issues, as well as understanding where within the various social media channels customers are most prominent. All this helps to focus your customer service.

6.    Don’t Personalise

Our earlier post this month showed that adding a personal touch when communicating through social media has a positive effect. While customers might find it easier to communicate via the internet this does not necessarily mean that they don’t want to talk to a real person. Adding a name to a bio conveys the idea that a query or problem is being taken seriously and is being dealt with. Also, doing so will ensure that your representatives are accountable and part of the wider business.

What experiences have you had with customer service in social media? Good, bad, feel free to share.

While social media as a corporate communications channel is gaining ground, it’s still seen as a rather new and novel medium. As a result of this, and because there is a level of uncertainty with regards to its benefits, there seems to be a large demand for case studies and practical examples of corporate social media use.

With this in mind we will be sharing a number of case studies on our Blog over the next couple of months. First up, we highlight how we worked with Kellogg’s UK who were looking to roll out a social media strategy across their business.

To begin Kellogg’s sought to understand, in detail, what was being said about their brand and four of their main product groups; Coco Pops, Special K, Crunchy Nut, and Rice Krispies Squares. Working with 6Consulting, Kellogg’s launched a listening and monitoring initiative. The insight gained through this was then used as a basis for future cross departmental social media involvement. (more…)

We’ve been talking a lot about various aspects of engagement over the past few weeks on the blog. Lauren Vargas wrote a great post about adding social aspects to your CRM strategy, and her point below really stuck out for me.

Before adding social to the mix, you must ensure your organization has a sound infrastructure in place to receive social data and connect to transactional data. Social media elements must be an extension of the CRM infrastructure and the data presentation must not simply be slapped on top, but flow seamlessly into the design.

Earlier this week Teresa Basich detailed 5 ways that engagement is more than talking, and  I was similarly struck by point #3 in her post:

Making the customer experience easier/more pleasant/quicker/all of the above. Does this include talking with them? Usually. But not always. Improved engagement in this case can also mean bumping up the usability of your website. Does your site allow folks to find what they need easily? Does it pique their interest? Does the flow of information on your site allow visitors to navigate through it quickly? This is just one example, but do you see where I’m heading here?

What am I leading to here? I’m leading to the point that companies need to stop thinking of engagement as something “the marketing team handles” and start thinking about it more how my colleagues describe it above. It’s an activity that goes on across all parts of the organization. We call it “answering the social phone” internally, and that phone ideally sits on everyone’s desk and allows all employees to better understand how the conversations that are happening on the social web affect their job.

Ford Motor Co. has been leading the charge in the auto industry with their innovative campaigns for a few years now.  Many of us remember their Fiesta Agents challenge, and many more tuned in to see the reveal of their new Ford Explorer via Facebook. The Awesome Blog wrote a great review of the reveal, and noted:

Ford needed to connect with their potential consumers, generating excitement about the new model and ensuring buyers were armed with in-depth knowledge about the vehicle. Fortunately, Ford tapped the full potential of Facebook in order to create a truly engaging and interactive conversation about the new Explorer, and their approach is worth breaking down for any brand considering a Facebook campaign of their own.

Ford has been out there engaging with their community for years, and the insights that their community provides aren’t just data points limited to marketing. They’re insights that can be used across all business units. Case in point? A tweet yesterday by Ford noting that they’re passing product feedback over to the design team.

There are plenty of examples of companies breaking out of the “engagement is for marketing!” silo, and I wish I had time to share them all. To add two more into the mix, what about Comcast’s great use of service-related engagement, or the Red Cross’ social media disaster relief and notification efforts?

For companies that limit engagement to their marketing departments, the question becomes something similar to what Lauren described above – how can you connect social to transactional data across the enterprise? In other words, what internal channels do you need to create or open up to let everyone take advantage of this feedback? What parts of your organization would benefit immediately from being on the front lines, and how can you put them there?

I’m interested to hear your opinion. What other examples jump to mind of companies that have broken out of the “engagement is for marketing” silo? Share them in the comments!

* Photo provided by CraftyGoat

There’s no doubt that social media has had a big impact on customer service. We’ve seen companies exceed expectations by being proactive and going out of their way to answer customer queries quickly and effectively. These recent developments however have also raised our expectations and we’ve seen customers end up thoroughly disappointed while tweeting their issues at a dormant corporate account in vain.

In anticipation of National Complaints Day, Foviance is organising a roundtable event on August 12^th to discuss exactly what impact social media has had on customer service. The likes of Warren Buckley from BT, Paul Hopkins from Thomas Cook and Rob Skinner from PayPal UK will be speaking alongside our very own Sullivan McIntyre who will share some of the insights we’ve gained over the years in working closely with large corporate customer service departments implementing their social media strategies.

The roundtable discussion will explore how companies are working towards effectively integrating social media channels in customer service. In addition, speakers will also share some of the challenges this has posed and look forward to what the future might hold.

If you’re interested in what companies are doing on this front and our own experiences in this field, follow the discussion on the day: either search #ncd2010 on Twitter or download a full report of the findings through the National Complaints Day website.

Happy National Complaints day!

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!

This introductory post was written by Nigel Orfei, Director, Customer Services for Radian6. Nigel will be contributing to this blog on a regular basis to share general best practices about managing customer service in the online social space, and he’ll be answering some of the common questions we receive from our clients about our platform, as well as sharing tips and tricks for getting the most out of your social media monitoring efforts. Interested in more resources about social customer service from Radian6? Take a look at our eBook from May about creating a social customer service model, and sift through our Resource Library.

The processes for contacting Customer Support at your cable company or utility company are pretty clear. Most of you know who to contact (or have a number to call), are aware of how you’ll be helped, and know what information you need to provide in order to get help. Unfortunately, you’re probably also aware of what these Customer Support departments can’t help with.

One of the benefits of social media is its ability to break down walls. You don’t need to — and shouldn’t have to — know who to contact to get in touch with our company. If you reach out to a member of our Community Team, they’ll do their best to help you, or they’ll put you in touch with the person best prepared to answer your questions. This is the same across the board – if you contact us via phone, email, or on Twitter (@radian6support).

These instances are when the Radian6 Customer Support Team comes in. I can say confidently that every member of the team will do his or her absolute best to get you what you need to be successful. Quite often we get a support question forwarded to us that starts with, “I’m not sure if you can help…” so let me clear up what we can help with:

• Impromptu feature/functionality training
• Coaching through our different training programs, why you should attend, help with sign-ups, how it will help you
• Solving challenging how-to questions
• Helping clarify how and why various features are useful
• If anything comes our way that we can’t answer, we’ll find and connect you with the person who can.

To take this one step further, when you reach out to us, provide us the information below for the best response:

• Account name
• Name of your topic profile
• What you need help with
• If you’re having a problem with one of our platforms, describe the problem
• Has anything changed?
• What date/time is best to reach you?
• How can we reach you? Phone or email – please provide one or the other

This is just an introduction to what we need to best help you, and we want to know what you’d like to learn from our team. Talk to us in the comments, share your thoughts on how you’re using Radian6, and let us know what knowledge gaps you think we can help fill about social media monitoring.

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.

Customer service is inherently social. When you take away all the bells and whistles, it is and always has simply been a conversation between a company and its customers.

Now that social media is a key location for social interaction in general, it follows that customer service inevitably has to have a presence there as well. In this case, what is popular is right, and it’s time to face it. There is a conversation happening about your company somewhere in the social realm (right now!), regardless of whether you have an official presence there. A lot of so-called “social media blunders” have actually been “customer service blunders” that gained traction as they were shared across social media channels. By not having an official social media presence, you’re letting other people lead the conversation about you. And with the unprecedented opportunities available to companies for listening to and interacting with audiences (especially with the added benefit that this can be tracked and measured), it’s hard to think of a reason not to take advantage of it.

That being said, I am a firm believer that a company’s social media presence should be relegated to the areas where it is the most congruent with the brand and its audience, rather than spreading it to every social media platform available just to “be there”. I wouldn’t go so far as to say proceed with caution – but do proceed with a strategy.

Without a solid strategy behind your social media presence, you risk damaging your company’s reputation rather than enhancing your relationships. The following characteristics of social media are those that present great opportunities for customer service – and potential pitfalls to avoid:

- It’s public. Beginning with the most basic level of involvement (all you have to do is watch and learn), there is already a huge opportunity presented here. One of the greatest advantages of social media is that you can now listen to your audience and instantly gather feedback. The world has suddenly become a free-form focus group for any company willing to take advantage of it.

Potential pitfall: Everyone else has the power to listen to you too, so make sure you mean what you say.

- It’s fast. Not only can you hear what is relevant now, but it grants the opportunity to react quickly as well.

Potential pitfall: If you miss an opportunity to act or react, that can also carry a lot of weight.

- It’s also where the action is happening. People are researching and actually purchasing your product in the same place that they are having conversations. Think of how much customer service there is surrounding the point of purchase in a brick-and-mortar store. This is to ensure that customers are getting helpful information that gears them toward a purchase, and so that they have a good experience to pass on. Social media now provides that same guidance to online shoppers.

Potential pitfall: There could be many competing sources of knowledge and opinions about you and your company – you need to make sure that a customer is hearing what you want them to hear, but you can’t control all of it.

- The ripple effect is exponential. Word of mouth has never been so loud. Due to the sheer number of people one individual can reach in a matter of seconds, good news travels fast.

Potential pitfall: Bad news travels faster.

- It’s entertaining. Content that is entertaining will be passed on simply for that factor, so it can transcend the normal niche of your market.

Potential pitfall: There are probably other people out there who are more entertaining than you are. (Even those of us who don’t own guitars know that United Airlines breaks them. And we can sing about it.)

- Social media is young. We’re just getting started, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed – by anyone. Mistakes have been and will continue to be made, but it’s liberating to know we’re not really held to any sort of tradition here. Instead, it’s all about getting out there and seeing what works. It’s exciting, and it’s fun to see the new ways that companies are interacting with their audiences.

Potential pitfall: Mistakes that are made happen in real-time, in front of an audience.

- It’s detached. The irony of social media is that it actually strips out a main component of social interaction – being physically present. This encourages very candid conversation that companies never had access to before.

Potential pitfall: Audiences are fickle and the detachment of social media can increase that because it decreases any consequences (or guilt) for moving on. It can grant the extra courage it might take to speak out negatively about something as well. What that means for a company is that you can quickly grab people’s attention, but you still have to have an overall strategy for customer satisfaction in order to keep them loyal.

Social media has proven to be a convenient and effective medium for interacting with your audience. However, as useful as it is, it should not be thought of as the big picture. The biggest pitfall to avoid is looking at social media as the entire customer service solution.

It’s important not to lose site of the fact that, beyond this, there are still human beings looking for a solution to a problem in a simple, personable way. How you address that overall depends on your personality, philosophy, and what you are willing to offer. Your social media presence should be built around and always be working to enhance that, but it should not be the only piece of the solution.

I encourage you to join the conversation that is happening out there in the social realm and use it to strengthen your customer service principles and your relationships. Just remember to “proceed with a strategy” and don’t risk letting the pitfalls get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish overall.

Molly Privratsky is the Support and Training Manager for eROI.

This shifting customer landscape can be difficult to adjust to, and even tougher to weave into your customer service models. This ebook focuses on how you can get started creating a more customer-centric culture that appeals to your customer, prospect, and community audiences and gets them turning to you as well as their networks for help making buying decisions.

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!

If actions speak louder than words, then it’s no surprise that customer service is playing a larger and larger role in peoples’ buying decisions. Today’s marketplace is packed with redundant products and services, so we turn to big-picture differentiators, like brand reputation and buying experience, to help us make purchasing decisions. This is also part of why we talk to our friends and networks about their experiences with a brand or product, and share our own experiences, as well.

Before the Internet, though, we’d tell a few friends about our fantastic or horrible experience with a brand, and they’d tell a few people, and eventually it would fizzle out, probably not having reached more than 20 people by the time the conversation died. But now, if we have a great (or equally bad) experience, we can share that experience in a blog post, a blog comment, a tweet, a video, a Facebook status update, and on and on, and that commentary could potentially be seen and shared by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people.

That kind of mass exposure has a definitive impact on brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

Now that your customers can have such a huge voice in the marketplace, it stands to reason that they need to be handled with a bit more care than the traditional customer service model allows. In the best case, that fantastic care you give will make your customers champions for your brand.

Customer Service is More Than a Department

Companies such as Zappos and L.L. Bean are known for their customer-focused business models. Everything they do, from pre-transaction to post-transaction is focused on making sure the customer experience is as high-quality as possible. Customer service for these companies is not just a department, it’s an important part of the corporate culture.

In these instances, because the customer service mindset lives outside the walls of a single department, the job of every employee to a certain extent is to speak on behalf of the customer. Internal and external conversations, marketing collateral, and larger business initiatives take into consideration the customer, making the entire system more inviting, personal, and people-friendly.

The Marketing Angle

At the end of the day, your business relies on relationships. People choose to buy from you because they like the relationship opportunity your brand presents — it feels good to them — and they come back because they get satisfaction from that relationship they’ve built with you. You’ve solved a problem of theirs and done it in a way that fits them.

To that end, strong relationships will always be talked about, be they with another person, a company, a product, or a service. We share the experiences we have in our relationships with others as a way to connect and relate, and the more extreme the experience (good or bad) the more it will get talked about.

Simply, if you provide top-notch customer service, people will talk about you. They’ll tell others about how well they were treated in your care, what they thought of your product or service, and if they’ll be going back to you for future purchases. With such good word being spread, others will be interested in your products and services, and they’ll seek you out, too.

Creating a positive and personal customer experience is a fantastic way to get people referring their friends, family, and larger networks to your company. The personal reference has power, and it’s one of the strongest marketing tools a brand can work to develop.

How are you improving customer service inside the walls of your company? How do you think those improvements will impact the way your customers, prospects, and community talk about you?

In a recent poll by the TSIA of firms using social media, 68% of companies said they don’t know or can’t measure the ROI of social media. That’s a real shame, and if that’s the case for you, I would argue that you are focusing your social media efforts in the wrong place.

There are certainly tools out there to help you measure your efforts in social media, but sometimes it’s not the tool’s fault, it’s the business case.

Many people take a classic approach to social media and treat it like just another media channel, expecting to see instant results like they do with other online media such as banners, text links, and search. This is why they find it hard to see results that make for a strong ROI.

In the case of social customer support, I would argue that this is the single best place to focus your social media efforts, since it can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program we have ever seen before. Spotting a customer issue, responding to it, and solving the problem in minutes using social media provides what can only be called an exceptional customer experience.

In fact, a recent Forrester study shows that customers actually prefer a better customer experience compared to everyday low prices, and, moreover, great customer experiences drive positive word of mouth (WOM). So why wouldn’t you center you social media efforts in this area?

Layering on social media tactics for support can also decrease your contact center costs. Tactics like providing free support forums, peer-to-peer collaboration and discussion threads on social networks, and support through microblogging can act as a string of defense before a person calls you’re your contact center (which is the highest cost support vehicle any company can have).

Not everyone enjoys calling into a contact center and, as social media evolves, people will expect to be able to get support through the channels they prefer and feels most comfortable using.

The downside of poor customer service has been well documented on the web, and more and more people are taking to the web to warn other would-be customers of their dissatisfaction. Don’t let that be your company! Great customer service enabled by social media is a no-brainier, and it is the single best place to build your business case for social media.

—-

Paul Dunay is Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications, author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009) and Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies. His unique approach to integrated marketing has produced significant revenue and cost-savings for Avaya, and has led to his recognition as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008.

How’d April treat you? Did you get all you needed from us last month to get started creating some serious change in your organization? As always, if you want more, let us know — take a browse through the April ebook again, and let us know if you’ve got any questions or would like some deeper explanations of the concepts we covered.

This month we’re tackling customer service in this era of social technologies and heightened connectivity, talking about everything from creating a strategy for finding and responding to customer inquiries and comments online to identifying exactly how your customer service initiatives are creating or taking away from word-of-mouth response.

Here at Radian6, we often talk about how important it is for companies to “answer the social phone”, and hopefully the content we produce this month will detail exactly what we mean by that and why we put such emphasis on companies being aware of the comments and questions being posed about them online and taking steps to respond to them.

This month’s ebook also focuses on customer service, discussing some of the beginning steps you can take to get back to a customer-centric service and business model.

Unlike previous times, people have access to such incredibly high volumes of information and opinions these days that companies must work much harder to capture the attention of their target audience, and go above and beyond in every customer-facing touch point of their business to actually make a sale. If you consider that businesses thrive most not from one-time sales but from loyal customer patronage, companies have more work to do than ever to make even a small impact on customer buying decisions.

We want to help carry some of that workload by helping you figure out where deficiencies might be hiding in your customer service initiatives, what you can do on a social level to balance out those deficiencies, and what tools you’ll need to do that.

Have stories about how socializing your customer-facing departments has benefited your company and improved its bottom line? Please share. The real-life successes are what grounds us and gets us seeing the true value, instead of the possibilities of abstract concepts. And, of course, if you’ve got questions, just give us a shout.

Man, what a topic! Measuring the impact of your community on your business can sometimes be a tricky beast to tame. Each community is different, and each business may have a different purpose for measuring their community.  Before you can truly begin to measure the impact of your community, a few items need to be defined and agreed upon by your internal stakeholders.

Define Community Success

Defining what your definition of community success means is the first step in measuring your community impact. How you measure community impact largely depends on how you want to define what a “successful” community means for your business. For some, having a large community is important, while others may see a small but tight-knit community as the most valuable to their business. Some communities will come together around support and training topics, while others may center themselves around your philanthropic and local community projects. The definitions of success for these communities may vary greatly, so it’s important to have a solid definition of what you consider to be a successful community.

Combining Metrics

Chances are, there are metrics and KPIs in place across all departments of your business. Metrics like leads generated, sales closed, support calls answered, inquiries received, and number of website visitors within a set timeframe are all commonly-measured metrics, and ones that can be used to help measure your community impact. In our support and training case, support calls answered or tickets opened/closed may be two metrics that you can include to give a bigger picture of how your community is impacting your business. For our philanthropic community, inquiries received and website visitor metrics may be more appropriate to include in your measurement reports.

Benchmarking

Before you go wild and crazy with measuring community impact, define the metrics you’ll use and set benchmarks for each of those metrics.  Look at the metrics you’re going to tie in from your current measurement practices, and then look at the metrics that you’ll be introducing as new success metrics for your community.  Three big measurement areas are; cost savings, leads, conversions and sales, and awareness, attention and reach. We cover these in our March eBook in case you’d like to dig deeper.

Once you have your metrics defined, set your benchmarks and make sure everyone on your team is clear what they are. Start measuring your community impact from there.

Set SMART Goals

SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely goals are hands-down the best, yet often hardest, to set. For each metric you want to measure, look at your benchmark and come up with SMART goals which you will use to measure against as time progresses. Are you looking for a 5% increase in inquiries received that reference your community and philanthropic projects throughout the year? Perhaps you’re looking to reduce call center costs by enabling your customers to reach out online, or help each other by sharing learnings and solutions to commonly-occurring questions or problems. Whatever your goals are, make sure they have parameters and timelines.

Tying it all Together

So far you’ve created your definition of what a successful community looks like to your business, discovered which departments your community impacts, looked at how they currently measure success, lined up your measurement plan to tie in with those metrics, set a base level through benchmarking, and created SMART community goals.

Great, now what?

Put your measurement plan into action. Take time, whether it’s weekly or monthly, to sit aside and review both your metrics and goals, as well as the metrics your business already measures.

If your community ties in closely with your customer service department, look at how many cases opened/closed took place within the time period you’re measuring.  Did your community come to the rescue of a fellow member and help them solve something with minimal/no involvement from your customer support team? If so, look at what the value of a customer support rep is for an hour, or a day, and show how much money your community just helped you save.

If part of your successful community includes lead generation, look at how many leads generated are directly attributed to your community. Did a member recommend you to a colleague? Are there notes in your CRM indicating the source of a lead? Do you have these segmented and tracked in your monitoring solution? Did any leads that came from your community close this month? Leads generated and sales closed are wonderful numbers to show how your community is helping to grow your business.

When measuring your community impact it’s important to tie together your existing metrics and measurement practices with the ones you’re establishing that focus exclusively on your community. The goal is to get a big picture of how your community ties in with your business and helps you achieve your goals, NOT to show how great your community is in a silo.

There are many ways of measuring community impact, and this blog post doesn’t cover them all! Share your stories in the comments.

The social phone. It seems like a fairly simple concept, right? That’s essentially what a phone is, a tool or channel that allows people to connect to one another. We look at social media as the social phone – it’s the place where people can “call up” the brands and companies they want to talk to, to chat customer service and much, much more. And right now, it’s the responsibility of brands and companies to answer the social phone and talk with their customers over the channels they choose to use to communicate.

The good folks at The Social Customer put together a comprehensive ebook that hones in on the essence of customer service and the idea of answering the social phone, and we’re glad we could be a part of its creation. Our VP of Marketing, David Alston, helped round out this valuable conversation, which also touched on concepts like:

• The value of customer communities, for both customers and organizations.
• The very real opportunity of monetizing a branded community.
• Being available to your customers via their channels of choice.
• Aligning your organization to encourage customer feedback and integrate that feedback into future product and service plans.
• The importance of solidifying the foundation of customer service in your organization before diving into social media.

This ebook is filled with use cases and advice from some of the social media, customer service, and CRM industries’ most valuable players. We recommend you download it and take a read through to see how the growing collaborative relationships between businesses and customers are shifting the practice of customer service into high definition.

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.

Thanks to all of you Xbox fans out there who joined our hilarious and informative chat with McKenzie Eakin and Jerry Kansky during today’s Engaged Brand Twebinar. McKenzie is the Community Program Manager with Xbox LIVE Service and Jerry is a Social Support Analyst from the Xbox Elite Tweet Fleet.

Their Twitter handles give you a peek into their personalities. McKenzie aka @machetebetty is a former WOW player who came to work today with her mother’s bull whip (you’ll have to listen to the Twebinar to find out why and Jerry aka @jerrymoneta plays in a band called Moneta based in Seattle which he shamelessly plugs at the end of the Twebinar.

It wasn’t all fun and games talking to the Xbox crew today though. There was some really great information on why using Twitter as a means to connect with gamers has been such a positive experience for them.

Xbox has struggled with customer service perception in the past so they decided to start a 4 week pilot program called the Elite Tweet Fleet. They had 3 objectives:

1. To give support a human face
2. To proactively reach out to gamers
3. To educate a vocal community

The pilot project was a raving success and customer satisfaction levels were through the roof. The amount of positive reinforcement from the people they have supported has been immense. People are so pleased at the instant nature of support that they get with the Elite Tweet Fleet that they share their positive experience with others (the way that Tweeters do).

Jerry told us that the most important thing for people to remember in a Business Model of Twitter Support is that “absolutely every single tweet that is talking about your business is important.” Twitter is a unique way to create a connection with customers and the Tweet Fleet takes advantage of that fact.

Download the Xbox podcast to listen to more of the Elite Tweet Fleet’s learning’s and to hear some of their plans for the future. You’ll know it’s going to be a fun chat when McKenzie starts off by saying that “everything is more fun when it rhymes”, e.g. the Elite Tweet Fleet.

Thanks to everyone who came and listened to today’s Twebinar and for the multitude of questions. If you need some Xbox support, give them a shout @xboxsupport and if you just need some giggles follow Jerry and McKenzie. As always, there were some fun tweets that took place during the Twebinar:

Did you hear about Microsoft’s Xbox Elite Tweet Fleet? You can today.

Join Radian6 Community Director Amber Naslund with Marketing & Community VP David Alston in a Twebinar Today at 2 P.M. EST to meet the people behind the Xbox Elite Tweet Fleet team.

Tune in to Today’s Twebinar at:

• http://twebinars.radian6.com/ or
• http://www.blogtalkradio.com/theengagedbrand

The Elite Tweet Fleet makes customer support “social” using Twitter @Xboxsupport. What’s the benefit to Xbox players? Tune-in, Find out and Join the Conversation Today.

To tweet your comments and questions, use #Radian6 and include a “?”.

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Next Thursday’s Tune-in is all about YOU: Getting Organized and Managing Your Social Media Presence in 2010.

Amber will reveal 9 Guiding Principles to help Make Time Work for You.

Join Amber’s Free Webinar & Learn to:

• manage disruptions
• control information overload
• leverage tools
• use time saving templates
• wrangle task management
• & more!

That’s next Thursday, January 14th 2 p.m. EST

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Tune-in the 3rd Thursday in January. It’s all about Protecting and Empowering Your Organization by Creating Social Media Engagement Guidelines.

Learn the “Anatomy of Engagement” – in this Free Community Webinar presented by Radian6 Community Manager Lauren Vargas with Amber Naslund.

Space is Limited. So don’t miss out!

Thursday, January 21st at 2 p.m. EST

Get Engaged! We’re Listening. Tune-in Thursdays with Radian6.

What would Microsoft say? Could Twitter become the social model for customer service delivery?

Hear Microsoft’s answer in a Radian6 Twebinar Thursday January 7^th at 2pm EST

How many uses does Twitter have?

With 40 million using 140 characters to communicate, Twitter’s ‘reason for being’ continues to evolve. Twitter’s simple question “What are you doing” helped a U.S. President become elected; helped free American James Buck from an Egyptian jail after issuing his one-word tweet “arrested” – which subsequently inspired a book called Twitterville; helped Dell sell $6.5M in computers – and with Comcast, Ford and now Microsoft as examples, it’s also becoming part of an emerging model for customer service.

What does ‘Social Customer Service Engagement’ look like?

Meet Microsoft’s Elite Tweet Fleet. It’s a new team that tackles customer service issues the social way. The Fleet listens and scours the Twittersphere for customers having problems with their Xbox 360 and asks how they can help. Customers can also contact the Fleet directly on Twitter @Xboxsupport. It’s the brainchild of McKenzie Eakin who created a pilot project to see if communicating socially could help educate and enable customers to help each other. And it worked – so well – that the pilot is now part of the business, working closely with the customer service crew.

Meet the Elite Tweet Fleet in our first Radian6 2010 Twebinar

The Elite Tweet Fleet has been up and running in time for the Christmas rush. Sales for Xbox 360 consoles were close to $1M last month alone and with all the latest Xbox games found under this year’s tree, Xbox consoles are no doubt getting a workout. So our Twebinar next week with Microsoft’s McKenzie Eakin and one of her Elite Tweet Fleet members, Jerry Kansky, will be topical. It will be our first Twebinar in 2010 so collect your questions and join the conversation Thursday January 7^th at 2 p.m. EST.

So… what is a Twebinar?

A Twebinar is a mashup between a live podcast/audio broadcast and Twitter as the backchannel for discussion.

How Can I Participate?

Join us by logging in with your Twitter account on Thursday, Jan 7th (no preregistration is required) or listen to the audio on our Engaged Brand BlogTalkRadio channel.

Since we’ll be using Twitter, just tweet us your questions with a #radian6 hashtag, include a “?” and we’ll be sure to see them. We’ve built the Twebinar interface so you can see all the tweets and discussion at a glance, listen to the broadcast, and submit your questions as we chat.

Twebinar Tips:

• Once the Twebinar has started, log in and you should hear music or the live broadcast. If you don’t hear the audio right away, please refresh your browser.
• If you login before the Twebinar starts, refresh your browser once the Twebinar begins and the BlogTalkRadio (BTR) interface will show up and start playing.
• To ask a question, type it in to Twitter using the #radian6 hashtag and end it with a “?”. We’ll see it.
• Your hosts for this episode will be @ambercadabra and @davidalston. Feel free to send them advance questions on Twitter if you like. We’ll also have @vargasl on hand to help gather and answer your questions during the broadcast.
• If you’d prefer to listen to the audio without the Twebinar interface, you can do so at our BlogTalkRadio channel.
• The full broadcast of the event will be posted on our blog shortly after the event is over, or you can always listen to the archive on BTR.
• Any other questions, leave them here in the comments or ask us on Twitter and we’ll do our best.

We’ve posted a few times here about what kinds of conversations to listen for in social media. (Just in case you missed them, you can find them here, here, and here).

But the question that inevitably comes next: What do I say?

So here, my list for you for a few response types you might consider when engaging the conversations you’d like to be part of. They don’t have to be about your brand necessarily – they can be about your industry or relevant trends or just stories of interest. But engaging is a big part of the social media equation, so maybe these will help you with your responses.

Thank you.

You really can’t use this one enough. Thanks for thinking of us! Thanks for mentioning us or recommending us. Thanks for that great bit of information you shared. Thanks for pointing out the typo on our website. Thank you for sharing your viewpoint (even if I disagree). Graciousness matters, and the simple art of thanking someone can indicate very subtly that you’ve been listening.

I’m sorry.

Screw ups happen, and saying you’re sorry isn’t about taking blame. It’s about genuinely apologizing for someone’s frustration, inconvenience, or loss. We’re sorry your stuff didn’t arrive on time. We’re sorry our site was down when you needed it. We’re sorry we dropped the ball and didn’t respond to your email.

Sometimes it’s taking responsibility for something, other times it’s enough to acknowledge that something didn’t work the way it was supposed to. In any case, a simple apology can go a long way toward making a frustrated person more open to hearing what else you might have to say.

Here’s how I can help.

Information is currency. When someone is expressing a need you can fill, taking action works wonders. Looking for the price for that? Here you go. Soliciting ideas for a book on a topic? I’ve got some recommendations. Having trouble with your blog? Let me point you to an expert I know.

Being helpful and sharing your knowledge and information is priceless on the web. The answer doesn’t always have to be your thing/product/service. It’s about being a good citizen of the communities in which you participate, and offering up information you have that can be useful to others, without the expectation of anything in return.

How can I help?

A question instead of a statement, this is one of the most fruitful responses you can offer (just ask Frank Eliason from Comcast). It acknowledges your interest in helping, your availability to assist, and asks the other person to help you by understanding more about their needs. After all, half of talking is about the desire to be heard. And sometimes it can help you get to the bottom of an issue quickly and simply without kicking up a lot of dust.

Yes (or No) and here’s why I think so.

Please don’t be afraid to have an opinion on the web. Opinions aren’t permanent. You can change your mind. But much of the value in participating in online discussions, from Twitter to blogs, is about the ongoing dialogue. If we all band together and deliver one word answers, or follow the flocks in order to not stir the water, we’re going to have one dull internet on our hands.

Even if you represent a company, you can have a viewpoint that you share. Share it with respect and courtesy, but it’s okay to share your thoughts on a topic. Yes, that means you’re open to the feedback and opinions (even dissenting) of others. But humans want, well, humanity in our conversations. Talk to us like people, and let us talk back to you in the same way. We like you when you have ideas and thoughts to share.

What would you add? Those of you out there conversing and chatting, either individually or on behalf of your companies, what shape do your conversations take? What are you learning? Please share with us.

image credit: pinkmoose