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Opaque Transparency

March 31, 2009 By

Online customer reviews are one of the developments that have raised the popularity of social media. Many retailers offer customers the option to write and read reviews about the products they sell. Customer reviews form a great complement to professional reviews. Whereas professional reviews can tell us how good a product is to use, customer reviews can tell us how good a product is to own—and—how good the retailer is.

There is risk involved though. One recent case involved Belkin’s representative of Amazon.com. Mr Bayard not only offered to pay customers $0.65 per positive review of Belkin, he also wrote positive reviews himself using pseudonyms.

Social media can make a lot of a company’s marketing more transparent, but cases like these make it a false sense of transparency. I hope that companies take an ethical point of view when dealing with customer reviews, but there will be exceptions unfortunately.

There might be more than meets the eye. Be critical.

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Social Media And Your Customer Contact Cycle

October 19, 2008 By

With every product/service you’re marketing, selling and servicing, you’ll have a customer contact cycle. The customer contact cycle consists of touch points that represent moments of interaction (contact) with your consumer. There are roughly four stages:

  • Awareness: When a consumer is first exposed to your product. Examples are reading a review or seeing an ad.
  • Interest: When a consumer becomes interested in purchasing your product/service. Examples are visiting the shop or trying out the product.
  • Purchase: When a consumer buys your product/service.
  • Service / Re-Purchase / Renewal: When a consumer comes back with a problem or with an intention to re-purchase/renew.

Social media provides new opportunities to enhance the customer contact cycle with new customer touch points. Using tools like Facebook and Twitter, it’s possible to have a continuously open channel with customers. Leverage social media as customer touch points to increase interaction with current and prospective customers, create an open brand image and enable cross-selling and up-selling.

Take advantage of social media to enhance your customer contact cycle.

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