Technology has humanized the user experience by making it easier for people to communicate and share information.

Meanwhile, many businesses have used technology to go in the opposite direction, to dehumanize.

Look at customer service, which has sadly become a (near) robotic experience at many companies. Look at email marketing where companies send emails from an email address like “please-do-not-reply@we-hate-getting-email-from-you-com”.

Put aside all the usual stuff about social media offering great opportunities to promote your products, overturn negative experiences and build long-term relationships.

First and foremost, social media is a call for humanization in how you communicate. Social media has humanized interaction, technology has humanized the experience, but only you can humanize your business.

Here are 30 questions to ask yourself to help you humanize your business:

• How do we communicate?
  • Are we communicating in a human way?
  • What do our customers think of the way we’re communicating?
  • Are we consistent in the way we communicate?
  • Are we speaking the same language as our customers?
  • Are we enabling our customers to engage with us in a community or a dialogue (as opposed to a monologue)?
  • How do we go about transparency, authenticity and accountability?
  • How does our company culture support the humanization of our business?
  • How can we change or improve our business processes?

• How do we turn experiences into relationships?
  • How do we define our customer experience?
  • What are the things that truly matter to our customers?
  • How well are we communicating compared to other companies within and outside our industry?
  • How can we involve our customers as part of our brand?
  • In which ways are our customers sharing experiences and information about us?
  • Why are they sharing those particular experiences and pieces of information?
  • How can we promote positive interactions?
  • How do we deal with negative interactions?
  • How can we scale our communication to deal with a growing amount of customer interactions?

• How can we create value for both our customers and our business?
  • How can we leverage customer interactions for the benefit of our business?
  • How are we measuring our success in customer engagement?
  • Are we recruiting the right employees to help us humanize our business?
  • How can we empower our (first line) employees to represent our brand?
  • How are we rewarding our employees and our customers for contributing to our brand?

• How can we innovate?
  • How can we build or strengthen our customer community?
  • How can we match our products and/or services to the demand, expectations and values from the market?
  • Can we work with peers and/or competitors in our industry to provide value to the community?
  • How do we integrate online and offline communication to create a better customer experience?

I also made a SlideShare presentation with the 30 questions:

What are other things businesses can think about to humanize their business?

Photo credit: Aaron Bulger

The Dehumanization of Customer Service

Businesses have spent a lot of effort in making customer service as efficient as possible by introducing stuff like interactive voice response (IVR), self-service, and resolution scripts. It’s resulted in a poor experience where—as consumers—we have to press a bunch of buttons and wait for a long time before speaking to someone whose goal is to hang up the phone as quickly as possible.

Customer service departments have basically dehumanized customer interactions and it’s pissing people off. Respondents in the aforementioned survey mentioned “human service” and “true conversation” as key improvements for customer service.

Why Customer Flock to Social Media

Social media has humanized interaction and it’s no shocker that it’s become the weapon of choice for the new consumer to get customer service. When asked about the key sources for customer satisfaction, respondents answered:

• Competency
• Convenience
• Proactive engagement
• Personalization

Social media offers businesses the opportunity to deliver customer service in a way that scores better than traditional support methods on the four things listed above. Those who do it well will improve their customers’ experience, leaving competitors further behind.

Why It Isn’t about Social Media

Before you go all gung-ho and move your entire customer service department to the social sphere, think about this: it’s not about social media. People don’t want to use social media for customer service. People want customer service and they turn to social media because they feel that it works better than anything else you’re offering.

As we continue to see increased adoption of social platforms, it’s up to you to understand how shifts in consumer behavior will impact your business.

Creating Value from Online Customer Interactions

Social media is not the band-aid you slap onto customer service to stop the bleeding. With the right mindset, you can generate business value from online customer interactions, within and beyond customer service.

At the Customer Service Seminar, I will show you ways to create business value through online customer interactions by:

• Unleashing your own wave of new consumers;
• Analyzing your online customer interactions; and by
• Throwing away the case studies and best practices

There are only a few seats left, so reserve yours today. I hope to see you then!

The line-up is filled with people from various businesses eager to share their thoughts and experiences. Learn how social business is applied at companies like KLM and Microsoft. Xaviera Ringeling, Fred Zimny and Arjen Hof will give useful pointers on social media and customer service. Oh, and I’ve been asked to perform some tricks too.

The best part: we’re doing it for free. So head over to this page now and reserve your seat!

Online Customer Engagement

Social media has caused its fair share of brand debacles, but it’s also catalyzed great success. With an increasing number of people sharing their experiences online, pressure is mounting on businesses to learn, adapt and participate. Especially in the customer service arena, interactions are no longer necessarily private.

With growing expectations from the general public—and skepticism always lurking around the corner—it’s vital that businesses understand how to make the most of their online presence. As speakers, we’re committed to providing information, advice and findings that are of value. In turn, we also expect attendees to surprise or challenge us with their experiences.

If you’re looking to take control of your social business program, join us. We promise to make it worth your while.

The Cornerstones of an Online Community Strategy

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts on online engagement. I appreciate the willingness of businesses to make the most of their customer interactions. In particular, I’ll be addressing the following topics:

• The Nature of Conversations Learn what causes people to share their experiences online and understand to what extent it matters.
• Customer Activation Take what you’ve learned from customer interactions to activate a whole new group of customers.
• Corporate “Social Business” Responsibility Get an understanding of how customer interactions can become the cornerstones of your social business program and how to tie them to what matters to your business.

Yes, this event is good promotion for me, but no, I will not be sales-y. I know you’re not the person who visits an event thinking “Gee, I hope someone will sell me something”. No, you’re there for the content and to meet like-minded people. I’ll do my best to contribute to that.

In A Nutshell

• What: Customer Service Seminar 2011
• When: Thursday, May 26, 2011
• Where: MeetInc – Straatweg 1, 3604 BA, Maarssen
• Cost: FREE (as in beer)
• Website: http://www.customerserviceseminar.nl/

If you think this event will be of value to you, or if you know people who would benefit from attending, the registration page is here. I hope to see you on May 26^th!

The two of you continue your conversation and after a while, the car salesman leaves the table.

That was a stupid scenario and would—hopefully—never happen in real life, but on Twitter, it happens all the fucking time. Car dealerships, affiliate marketers, online shops, those pesky “gurus”… They start following you after you’ve mentioned a keyword they’re targeting and they unfollow you once they realize you can’t be arsed to follow them back. The fact that the process is often automated makes it look completely stupid. After I reviewed the Audi A1 last year, an Audi dealership from Florida started following me on Twitter.

It’s good to monitor conversations that are related to your brand, your market or your niche, but please include a human being and human interaction in the process so you won’t look like a complete idiot.

The extent to which social business is going to work out well for you depends largely on what you aim to achieve with it. Take the time to develop comprehensive goals and objectives. Use the results from the Analysis phase to establish a baseline which you’ll use to formulate goals/objectives and measure them against.

Here are some questions to ask when you start thinking about goals and objectives:

• Which goals/objectives need to be achieved?
  • What are the expectations of your customers?
  • What quantity is expected?
  • What are the levels of quality that you’ll distinguish between?
  • What levels of quality are acceptable?
• What is the time-frame?
• What is the available budget (for people, training, technology, et cetera)?
• What are the expectations in regards to ROI?
• Which KPIs are important to your stakeholders?
• How do these goals/objectives tie into existing corporate goals/objectives?
• How are we going to compare social business results to “traditional” (online) marketing results?

Remember that social business is just as much about “social” as it is about “business”. Your goals and objectives shouldn’t only aim at your business but also at your customers. What is your social business manifesto going to look like?

Here are some guidelines to help you develop goals and objectives as well as a social business manifesto:

• Focus Know what matters to you. Be where you need to be. Don’t talk to a void.
• Brand it Make sure your social business efforts are well-branded so they’re recognized by your community.
• Be consistent Manage both your community’s expectations as well as your own in terms of interaction (form, frequency, tone, et cetera).
• Go beyond Social business should be an extension of what you’re already doing. If it was the same, then there wouldn’t be any added value. Look at what social business can do for you what other activities cannot.
• Provide value Give to your community, this could be physical (e.g. samples), emotional (e.g. relationship-building), financial (e.g. discounts), intellectual (e.g. white papers) or anything else that is of value.
• Be human Remember the social aspect and incorporate the human aspect.
• Leverage Your social business efforts should focus on leveraging the strengths of social media and communities.
• Drive action Make sure your efforts move people to do something. Whether it’s a click, a comment, a purchase or something else, point them in the direction that makes business sense to you.
• Measure While some aspects of social business are difficult to measure, strive to establish metrics for everything you do.

I’ll be back with an announcement next week. Until then, comments and questions are welcome as always!

Social business is not a “marketing shortcut”, i.e. requiring low time and money investment while paying high dividends in branding and sales. For social business to be effective, an investment proportionate to it will be required.

But how much should you invest? The short answer is “That depends”, but I’ll try to give you some direction here with a number of examples on three levels:

• High-Level Strategic activities such as social business strategy. customer/brand planning and integration with corporate (marketing) activities.
• Mid-Level Operational activities such as organizational roll-out, presence management and brand monitoring.
• Low-Level Day-to-day tasks on platforms like blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

High-Level

Social Business Strategy: $20,000 – $200,000

Includes:

• Analysis of the company’s social business position
• Determination of goals/objectives and related metrics
• Mapping of goals/objectives to strategic initiatives
• Aligning of strategic initiatives with current company activities
• Plan for internal approach (required people, technology, policies)
• Training and coaching

Obviously, the range is huge but you can imagine that it really depends, for example on your company’s size, your current social business position, the existing expertise and what you’d like to achieve with social business.

Mid-Level

Community Engagement: $10,000 – $40,000

Includes:

• Training and coaching in social media monitoring
• Training and coaching in social media presence management
• Training and coaching in social media communication and engagement
• Training and coaching in content creation
• Training and coaching in social media measurement

A lot of the cost here will depend on your strategy and things such as your current knowledge, the complexity of your market, the amount of corporate branding that needs to be aligned and the extent to which external parties (such as agencies) are involved.

Low-Level

Blogging: $10,000 – $40,000

Includes:

• Creation and styling of blog
• Creation of content
• Interaction
• Search Engine Optimization
• Training and coaching

Facebook: $6,000 – $30,000

Includes:

• Creation and styling of Facebook Page/Profile
• Creation of content
• Interaction
• Training and coaching

For both blogging and Facebook, the investment will depend on whether you’re building something from the ground up or whether you’re looking to restructure something that already exists. In addition, the amount of content and the decision to create or outsource content will play a role.

Let me be clear that these figures are purely indicative and a result of my own experiences and that of people I asked. However, I think these figures are realistic and should give you a rough idea of what it would cost to go into social business.

If you have questions or remarks, let me hear them in the comments!

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a look into the challenges of going into social business. Using a number of key questions, I aim to make you think about which bumps along the road you might face. Let’s get started!

The following challenges await you when going into social business:

• Culture
• Integration
• Openness
• Receptiveness
• Governance
• Measurement
• Action

Let’s take a closer look at each challenge.

Culture

Social business requires a certain cultural approach that might not be natural to every organization. Think about the following:

• In which ways do you need to make changes to incorporate social business into your company culture?
• Is company politics likely to play the role of spoiler?
• Are you comfortable with empowering your employees to engage online?

Integration

Social business has to make sense and be consistent within your company. Be honest about the following questions:

• How will you integrate social business activities into existing activities and business units?
• Are you willing to create new jobs, retrain staff, updates processes, reallocate resources and revise corporate policies?
• To what extent are your IT solutions—e.g. website content management system, company firewall, et cetera—set up for social business?
• How will you establish brand consistency across all marketing channels (including social)?
• Are you capable of being in social business for the long haul?

Openness

You will share information and content on the social web. Think about the following questions:

• How open are you willing to be, also to your competitors?
• Can you talk about more than just your own company, products and/or services?

Receptiveness

You’re opening up to the world as well as putting yourself out there. Answer the following questions:

• How will you convince people that you’re not only willing to talk but also willing to listen?
• How will you make sure that people get the idea that you’re encouraging feedback?
• Are you willing to sacrifice control for feedback?
• How will you make people feel welcome for engaging with your brand?

Governance

Everybody has access to social media, inside or outside the workplace. Be clear inside your company on the following:

• Are people viewing social media more as a tool for personal benefits rather than business benefits?
• How will you make sure that everybody is on the same page when it comes to online engagement?
• Do you sufficiently understand the risks when everyone isn’t on the same page?

Measurement

Your social business efforts will need to point to reaching certain business objectives. Give the following some careful consideration:

• Is social media a threat to your current business model?
• How will you formulate a social business approach that contributes to reaching business objectives?
• Across how many time periods will you evaluate your efforts and do you know when you’d like to see success?
• How will you measure performance and ROI?

Action

Social business will require proactive monitoring, engagement, and content creation. Think about the following:

• How will you set up your organization to cope with that?
• Are you able to create content tailored to a social media audience?
• When you receive feedback, what will you do about it?

You don’t need to have a clearly defined answer for every challenge/question listed above. Some of the answers won’t even reveal themselves until you’re in the process already, but they act as an alert to what may be ahead.

If you have comments or questions, you know where to put them!

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business (covered in parts A, B and C)
• Internal considerations (covered in parts A and B)
• Debunking myths (covered in parts A, B and C)
• Social business in B2B environments

Today, we’ll look at social business in B2B environments.

There’s one more misconception that I haven’t mentioned so far and that is that social business is more for B2C companies that B2B companies. While B2C companies and products gain more traction in social media—they have more customers after all—it is blatantly untrue that social business wouldn’t work in a B2B environment. I’ll explain why and give you some pointers on what you can do to make social business work in B2B environments.

They’re Everywhere!

In B2B environments, the business is also conducted by people. People are increasingly on the social web and the social web spans across all age groups with increasing adoption by 35+ year olds. And why wouldn’t you expand your efforts on trade shows and in trade publications to finding your customers online?

More importantly, social business allows B2B companies to focus more strongly on some of the key factors that really matter in B2B environments:

• Trust B2B sales typically require a higher investment than B2C sales and as such, deeper consideration. Trust plays decisive role in these considerations and the eventual decision to make the purchase.
• Relationship Social media enables people in B2B environments to have constant contact, building a relationship to establish rapport and trust. When dealing with long sales cycles, the effect of using social media can be profound.
• Information A relationship takes time to develop but information can be provided instantaneously. Providing the right information and/or high-quality content online—and distributing them through social media—helps improve your image and facilitate your prospective customers in their purchasing process.
• Loyalty What about after the sales? Social media gives you an opportunity to improve your after-sales relationship with the customer. Grab this opportunity to build loyalty and drive repeat sales.
• Protect I always advocate this and it applies to any business environment: protect your brand. You can decide not to engage on certain social media platforms, but do register an official account. You don’t want to have your brand hijacked on, for example, Twitter and causing you enormous damage.

Moving Forward

What can you do to help make your social business efforts more successful in B2B environments? Here are some pointers to get you in the right direction:

• Observe your customers Get an idea of what’s out there and what’s currently being said by your customers. If they are already sharing their opinions and/or experiences online, this is valuable feedback for you.
• Ask your customers Find out what your customers think about social media and how they’d like you to engage with them. This can be done with a survey or with one-on-one interviews.
• Work with your customers Include the right customers in your social business approach by “promoting” them to an advisory board. This gives you a foundation to work from and makes them feel rewarded for being your customer.
• Let your customers work for you Ask your customers to share their experiences with your company. This can be in the form of a media interview, a case study, a blog post, et cetera. You’ll generate interesting feedback and they’ll be able to take center stage by sharing their success stories.

The most important thing to remember, however, is that there is no single off-the-shelf approach that’ll work for everyone. Social business is still largely uncharted territory and the truth will reveal itself only through taking action.

If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. Next week, we’ll start another mini-series as part of analyzing value and effectiveness by looking at caveats and pitfalls. See you then!

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business (covered in parts A, B and C)
• Internal considerations (covered in parts A and B)
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided social media myths into three categories:

1. Adoption and Diffusion related myths
2. Engagement-related myths
3. Business-related myths

Today, we’ll look at social media myths related to your business.

A great number of myths and misconceptions circulate around social media. Here’s my attempt at clearing the air to show where we truly stand:

• Small businesses need to be on social media Social media can provide value for small businesses but they need to realize where that value can be gained. Is it Twitter or Facebook? Or maybe Foursquare is a better option?
• Social media is only for “cool” brands Again, social media can provide value to any company as long as you focus on the right people, the right topics and the right platforms.
• Social media can be done by interns Your younger employees might be more versed in using social media but are they also able to react to crisis situations as adeptly as upper level staff? Are they also able to tie the use of social media to the company’s business/marketing objectives? In my opinion, top-down support throughout the organization is needed to be successful internally.
• Anyone can do social media While there are no high barriers to entering the social web, there are professionals that have experience in applying social media in businesses. Find these people and let them help you. It’s very similar to SEO and web design; you could do it all in-house, but there’s expert help out there. We’ll get more depth into what matters when you’re considering the services of social business consultants at a later stage.
• Social media is cheap While many social media platforms are free or low-cost, creating accounts will only get you so far. There are more resources (time, people and money) needed to successfully create and implement a social business program.
• Using social media causes you to lose control over your brand Whether you’re using social media or not, people are out there and in control. They can talk about you whether you’re involved or not. Be happy that people are talking about you and embrace the fact that you can monitor—and act on—these comments and conversations.
• Social media ROI cannot be measured This statement’s not true either. Social media efforts can be measured, but do realize that the metrics involved are different. We’ll talk more about how social media measurement when the time is right.

If you know any other myths related to business, I’d love to hear them in the comments! Next week, we’ll look at social media in B2B environments, see you then!

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business (covered in parts A, B and C)
• Internal considerations (covered in parts A and B)
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided social media myths into three categories:

1. Adoption and Diffusion related myths
2. Engagement-related myths
3. Business-related myths

Today, we’ll look at social media myths related to communication and engagement.

A great number of myths and misconceptions circulate around social media. Here’s my attempt at clearing the air to show where we truly stand:

• Social media is for broadcasting messages If this was true, it wouldn’t be social. This doesn’t mean that you can’t broadcast if it’s relevant to your network.
• Social media is about conversations It can be about conversations, just like it can be about broadcasting. The “social” in social media relates more to the content than the method of transmission.
• Consumer engagement is always the right thing to do There’s difference between doing something that can’t hurt and something that’s right. It can’t hurt to engage with your consumers, but is it worth it? If they’re wondering where they can buy your product, do you reply by chit-chatting about the weather? Be conscious about what you’re using social media for and you’re not using social media for.
• Social media is informal Twitter might come across as glorified text messaging, but not all social media is informal. There are bulletin boards, professional networks (like LinkedIn), and blogs that require more formal behavior and communication. In addition, the tone with which you communicate in social media shouldn’t deviate too much from the tone with which you communicate in your current endeavors (e.g. website, brochures, emails).
• It’s impossible to build relationships online I’ll admit that social media has changed the definition of “friend” to a certain degree, I don’t think it’s impossible to build quality relationships. On the contrary, social media enables you to build relationships with people you wouldn’t otherwise get in touch with in the first place!
• Set it and forget it You can’t create a Twitter account and expect people to come to you immediately. It’s like moving into a new house, telling nobody the address and expecting people to drop by. Fact remains that you need to put your presence out there.
• Social media is about quick wins While it’s possible to make a big splash quickly, there are many more long-term benefits. Social media is more about rolling a snowball down a hill than about making a big splash in the pool.
• Content is king I love this one. How many great books do you not know about? Probably plenty, right? How do you know they’re great if no-one tells you? My point is that content isn’t everything, it’s just the start. Distribution is the bridge with your audience that will make your efforts successful. Put your efforts into both content and distribution.
• Viral marketing is king This is a fun one too. Here the focus is on distribution but it’s always hard to predict virality. How do you exactly create a viral video? You don’t; the community decides whether your content goes viral, not you. Yes, there are factors that give you a better chance at success—and we’ll discuss some of them later this year—but there’s no such thing as off-the-shelf viral content.

If you know any other myths related to communication and engagement, I’d love to hear them in the comments! Next week, we’ll look at business-related social media myths, see you then!