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 truth is that floor traders are threatened with extinction as computerized trading has increasingly replaced them. Computers don’t give a damn about the long-term outlook of a stock or a portfolio, but are programmed to react to minute price changes in microseconds. Systematic trading netted a guy like Dr. Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies a whopping $2.8 billion in 2008.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a rant against systematic trading. In fact, now there’s a way to relive the old days of trading. Sort of.

Social Equity: The Next Big Thing?

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a number of “influence measurement tools” enter the social media space: Klout, PeerIndex and Social Chiefs, just to name a few. A new entrant is Empire Avenue, and it consists of more than just analytics.

Empire Avenue uses metrics from popular social media platforms like LinkedBook, Twickr and FaceTube to monitor your social activity and achievements. Then it assigns values to various parameters to come to a share price (expressed in their own virtual currency, Eaves). Yup, effectively, you’re for sale.

What Empire Avenue has done is turn social analytics into a social game by introducing the concept of social equity. And just like any stock price, yours can rise and fall based on your performance and your popularity. You build your social equity by staying active in social media and investing smartly in others. If you do this well, your (social) net wealth will rise.

Investing in Social Media Users

I’m getting a bit of kick out of Empire Avenue. I like the gaming element of building a portfolio of stocks that (I think) will do well. It’s new but very oldskool at the same time. Nowadays, traders don’t talk about sustainable wealth growth. They talk about volatility and latency, both of which are also exciting but on a completely different level.

You collect dividends from your Empire Avenue portfolio daily. Stock prices refresh once or twice a day, so you can easily analyze your portfolio and make adjustments by buying and/or selling. You get to invest in your own friends and your favorite social media peeps, while monitoring your own performance/activity as well.

Systematic Trading

I said Empire Avenue was oldskool and, to a large extent, it is. It’s still very new and the valuations are still being tweaked, but there’s also a newskool technique that works.

Everybody who signs up starts with a baseline stock price of 10 Eaves. Your stock price rises when you fill out your profile by connecting to various social platforms, buying shares in other people, and having others invest in you. If you do this well, your stock price can rise between 5 and 15 Eaves within minutes from signing up.

The newskool way of systematic trading relies on rapidly executing orders based on price fluctuations. In Empire Avenue, this roughly translates to buying shitloads of shares in people who just signed up, hope their stock rises significantly, and then sell. This tactic is simple, successful but not very social.

Echo Chamber of Commerce

Some of the big dawgs in social media have seen their stock soar to prices well above the starting price of 10 Eaves. Examples are Robert Scoble (101 Eaves), Jeremiah Owyang (99 Eaves) and Guy Kawasaki (74 Eaves). Here’s the problem I have with that: because everyone starts with the same baseline conditions, the later you get into the game, the harder it gets for you to invest in certain people.

If Empire Avenue reaches a majority stage of adoption, those people will be faced with a two-faced challenge: the high-performing stocks are almost out of reach and, worse, the upside of those stocks will not be as great anymore. What you’re effectively left with is the newskool tactic of rapid buying and selling. I predict this is going to be a turn-off for a lot of people who then don’t complete their profile. This will make the—currently quite fool-proof—newskool tactic a complete crapshoot.

I believe in social media and its future, but something like Empire Avenue does strengthen the thought that it’s a bit of an echo chamber. When you’re an early adopter, you can fully capitalize on what the game has to offer. For the majority of people who sign up later, the appeal decreases sharply.

The Bottom Line

I’m enjoying Empire Avenue and it adds a fun spin to social analytics, but unless they re-tool the mechanics, I think it’ll wear off pretty quickly after this first wave of adoption.

If you play Empire Avenue, I’d love to hear what your thoughts are. If you want to give Empire Avenue a try, you can sign up here.

Photo credit: Petrick

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!

I don’t question the count, I question the messaging. It’s always been made to sound as if those 600-whatever million people are unique users. They’re absolutely not all unique and I’ll explain why.

The Effects of Social Gaming

One of the causes for duplicate account creations is social gaming. Facebook is free and the majority of the games is free, so there’s effectively no barrier for people to create multiple accounts to play social games. To illustrate what I mean, I’ve taken screenshots of people playing the game “Madden NFL Superstars”. Take a look and don’t tell me they’re dedicated personal accounts.

These probably aren't the real Pittsburgh Steelers.

Clearly, this is Cory's "gaming account".

This one's clever. Use some chick's beach photo and boom: 3,500+ friends!

Yes, we get it, Shawn plays Madden.

Facebook and Social Gaming

I don’t know how many duplicate or fake accounts there are and it’s impossible to determine that anyway. It’s far more interesting to understand why it matters. Social gaming on Facebook is huge:

• Over half of all Facebook accounts are used to play social games.
• There are over 50 million daily player accounts and close to 300 million monthly player accounts.
• Fifty percent of all log-in sessions on Facebook are for gaming purposes.
• Twenty percent of social gamers have paid money for in-game benefits. The most conservative projection I’ve found has the worldwide social gaming market exceeding $1 billion this year.
• The top 8 games on Facebook average at least one million daily players and 10 million monthly players.
• Facebook dominates social gaming with a market share of 28%. There is still potential for the social gaming market to grow within and beyond Facebook.

The Marketing Challenge

The way I see it, the rising popularity of social gaming presents a double-edged marketing challenge:

• On the one hand, the growing interest and activity in social gaming provides new monetization opportunities. With the addictive nature and time commitment involved, branded games and/or virtual goods also offer opportunities for frequent and intense brand engagement.
• On the other hand, the low barrier for playing social games renders a portion of the player base unmarketable. Demographic profile information is often incomplete or incorrect and this makes it difficult to understand the player population accurately. Moreover, underage children are also part of the player base and that makes monetization more difficult.

The Bottom Line

Don’t fall in love with the sheer volume or the absolute numbers. Get an understanding of the make-up of these numbers and how they apply to your business and your customers.

Let’s take a closer look at Facebook advertisements, how well they perform, what you should be doing and what you definitely shouldn’t be doing.

Three Forms of Exposure

As a brand, you can achieve three forms of exposure on Facebook:

• Advertisements These are ads with a link to either a landing page or a Facebook Page.
• Social Impressions These are ads with a link to either a landing page or a Facebook Page, but with the addition of the names of friends who like the ad.
• News Items These are items from a brand that appear in a person’s News Feed.

Facebook Advertising Effectiveness

According to data from Nielsen, having only an ad doesn’t result in very high recall, awareness or purchase intent. In fact, the numbers are awful for only “paid media”. Social Impressions and News Items can be considered “earned media”, because your friends have liked the ad or you have liked the brand’s Page to receive news updates. The addition of Social Impressions and News Items boosts recall, awareness and purchase intent of ads.

It is also important that Social Impressions and News Items appear frequently. Recall, awareness and purchase intent of the ad increase with the frequency of Social Impressions and News Items. This is encouraging, because it infers that active engagement with fans results in higher ad effectiveness.

However, caution should also be exercised. Recall, awareness and purchase intent say nothing about someone actually performing an action. Data from Webtrends and Chitika reveals that Facebook ads have horrible click-through rates.

There are multiple theories as to why Facebook ads suck in performance. In talking to people, their thoughts included “advertising simply doesn’t work”, “people don’t notice the ads”, and “brands don’t take the right approach to advertising on social networks”. Personally, I think the ads’ performance sucks because the ads themselves suck.

What Should You Not Do

With a growing number of advertisers and advertisements, there’s also increasing competition in the “war for eyeballs”. If you choose to advertise on Facebook, the ads need to be conspicuous, relevant, valuable… and correctly spelled.

Thanks to Rich Harris for letting me use some of his screenshots!

Getting the Most out of Facebook

Here are 5 steps to help you gain more effective exposure on Facebook:

1. Gain Organic Impressions Get people to like your brand’s Page. Whether you employ offline methods, online methods or Facebook ads to get people to like your Page, having those Fans will increase your exposure through News Items.
2. Engage Frequently Post at least once or twice each day on your Page to gain frequent exposure. Buddy Media conducted research on Facebook Wall engagement by businesses, but your mileage will value. Evaluate the feedback you get to understand the effect of frequency on your brand’s exposure. Remember that people can still hide your updates if they’re annoyed by them.
3. Drive Engagement Use Page updates to acquire feedback on your products/services as well as your social offerings. Engage actively to understand how Facebook makes the most business sense to you.
4. Relate Ads to Behavior The limited space and attention span of an ad makes it difficult to be compelling. Unlike Google AdWords that target users who are actively searching for something in particular, Facebook ads are often displayed based on a person’s profile information. The lack of immediate relevance is an important cause of lower click-through rates. Instead of targeting people based on demographic information, focus on an action someone is performing inside Facebook. For example, if they’re playing a game that’s similar to your game, you can increase your click-through rates by advertising when people are playing that game. Another example is to advertise your shop when people are visiting the Page of a brand you sell products of.
5. Create Natural Transitions When possible, create natural transitions from an ad to the eventually desired action. One way to do this is to have the ad direct to a specific landing tab on your Facebook Page. From there, you have more space and time to drive action, e.g. signing up for your newsletter or going to a landing page on your website.

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!